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DevOps & Automation · Foundational

Toil

Manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical operational work that scales linearly with service growth and has no enduring value.

Definition

Google SRE defines toil by these traits and recommends keeping it below 50% of an SRE's time, with the remainder spent on engineering that reduces future toil. Examples include manual restarts, hand-run deployments, and copy-paste ticket handling.

Example

Manually rotating TLS certificates on 200 servers every quarter is toil that should be automated.

Exam tip

Not all operational work is toil; one-off design work or incident analysis that produces lasting value is not toil.

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