Change Advisory Board

Tag: SRE

  • Stone, Soul, and Software

    Stone, Soul, and Software

    The philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a “little flesh and breath” or a “network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries”, while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign religions share fundamental truths. Masonry, founded on Geometry, or the fifth science, utilizes symbols like the Rough Ashlar, representing the unpolished mind awaiting cultivation through liberal education, and the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which denote strength and stability.

    Ancient texts, particularly the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, have shaped modern language and literature. The KJV has contributed more to English than perhaps any other literary source, providing phrases like “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41) and introducing words like helpmate, derived from “help meet for him” in Genesis. Its influence is evident across English literature in works by Shakespeare, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and C.S. Lewis. The original KJV included the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha, though the Apocrypha was later removed in the 1800s by scholars concerned about contradictions and whether the books were divinely inspired. The KJV is textually connected to the Textus Receptus, and resources like the King James Bible Dictionary exist to clarify its content, covering topics such as Strong’s Numbers.

    In modern technology, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) embodies a structured approach to maintaining complex systems, focusing on reliability as the “most fundamental feature of any product”. SRE, which originated from asking a software engineer to design an operations team, caps operational work (toil)—defined as manual, repetitive work that scales linearly—at 50% of an engineer’s time to ensure focus on engineering projects. Core SRE principles include managing service risk using error budgets, employing automation to maximize consistency and reduce costs, and utilizing distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Chubby to manage critical state reliably across failures. Monitoring is essential, prioritizing actionable alerts (immediate human intervention) and classifying outputs clearly (Alerts, Tickets, Logging). These practices, particularly preparedness, postmortem analysis, and automation, align with fundamental lessons learned across other high-reliability industries, such as the nuclear navy, defense, and aviation.

    Source #01: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

    Source #02: Contribution of the King James Bible to the English Language – International Journal of Applied Research

  • The Temple and the Error Budget

    The Temple and the Error Budget

    What happens when you put Solomon’s Temple next to a modern error budget and ask them both what “perfection” really means? In this episode, we explore the idea that reliable service is not just a technical outcome but a moral consequence — the visible result of character, duty, and brotherly love expressed through IT work.

    Drawing on Freemasonry, Stoic philosophy, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, we unpack what it means to work logarithmically toward an ideal you will never fully reach. We contrast the Masonic Temple and its working tools with SRE and ITIL principles: why 100% uptime is the wrong target, how continual improvement mirrors lifelong moral refinement, and how duty becomes the backbone of both spiritual life and professional reliability.

    Then we zoom in on the real builders of today’s “Temple”: the backup and recovery specialist guarding the sacred data; the infrastructure engineer hewing and setting the foundation; the Citrix/WebSphere/DB2 specialist adorning the inward workings; the mainframe programmer quietly automating away chaos; and the mainframe operator keeping vigil in the sanctum of production. By the end, your ticket queue, your runbooks, and your change windows look less like random toil and more like stonework on a shared, enduring structure.

    Source #1: ITILv4 Foundation

    Source #2: The Meditations by Marcus Aurellius

  • The Gauge and the Calendar

    The Gauge and the Calendar

    This episode explores the Twenty-four-inch Gauge — one of the earliest and most quietly profound symbols in Freemasonry — as a blueprint for surviving and thriving in modern system administration. The gauge’s ancient triad of vocation, refreshment, and service becomes a practical lens for navigating today’s impossible mix of project deadlines, user interruptions, enterprise timetables, automation demands, and mental load.

    We trace how the symbolic 8/8/8 division maps directly onto the SA’s world: focused work protected from interruption, rest defended as a prerequisite for cognitive reliability, and an ethical block of time reserved for strategy, documentation, personal growth, and helping others. Along the way, we connect the gauge to principles like conserving RAM, externalizing memory, automating repeated tasks, and carving out time for long-term improvement over perpetual tactical firefighting.

    In both Masonry and IT, time is a material you carve — not a stream you ride. This episode examines how the structure of the gauge can stabilize a chaotic profession and help every administrator build a life, and a system, that holds its shape.

    Source #1: Lecture of the First Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A. Limoncelli

  • The Square and the Server

    The Square and the Server

    In this episode, Change Advisory Board draws a straight line from the lodge to the datacenter via the square, exploring how the symbolic working tools of Freemasonry — the gauge, gavel, square, level, plumb, compasses, and trowel — can be reinterpreted as instruments of modern Site Reliability Engineering.

    From the Entered Apprentice’s 24-inch gauge to the SRE’s time budgets and service-level objectives, each tool becomes a lens for understanding the moral and operational discipline behind reliable systems. The common gavel’s task of removing rough edges parallels how engineers refine noise from telemetry. The Fellow Craft’s square and level emerge as early templates for data integrity and fairness — the moral geometry of incident response. The plumb rule, once a test of uprightness, becomes the model for aligned observability: systems and people both measured against their true vertical.

    Finally, the Master Mason’s compasses and trowel remind us that every great system — like every enduring fraternity — is held together not by code alone but by the invisible cement of trust, accountability, and shared purpose. Observability, in this light, is not just about data; it is the moral act of ensuring that what we build is true, just, and aligned with the architecture of higher principles.

    It’s a conversation about craftsmanship in code and in character — an investigation into how the oldest working tools of humanity still guide the newest disciplines of reliability engineering.

    Source #1: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

  • The Watchtower and the Mirror

    The Watchtower and the Mirror

    This episode examines modern software maintenance practices, specifically Monitoring and Observability, through the lens of Masonic symbolism to illustrate principles of operational wisdom. Monitoring is aligned with the Watchtower, focusing on tracking real-time quantitative data about known system conditions, much like a Tiler guards a perimeter to detect anticipated problems. In contrast, Observability is compared to the All-Seeing Eye and the Mirror, representing the capacity to ask questions about a system’s inner workings to troubleshoot novel problems or “unknown unknowns.” Together, these concepts constitute the operational wisdom required by Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), which is further mapped onto the Masonic pillars of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty to guide the pursuit of system reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement.

    Source #1: The Lecture of the Second Degree of Freemasonry

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy

  • The Trestle-board and the SLO

    The Trestle-board and the SLO

    Join us as we uncover how the timeless lessons of structure, planning, and meticulous refinement, taught within the degrees of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason, are utilized by modern Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). These lessons are crucial for designing, deploying, and maintaining reliable computing systems.

    What You Will Learn:
     – The Blueprint for Reliability: Adherence to Design. Discover how SREs apply the principles of the Trestle-board (used by the Master-workman to draw his designs) to their infrastructure. We discuss the foundational importance of explicit planning, focusing on translating business goals into measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The goal is to build a “spiritual building” (the reliable service) that achieves figure, strength, and beauty.
     – Refining the Rough Ashlar: Eliminating Toil. Learn how the SRE mandate to eliminate toil directly mirrors the builders’ transition from the Rough Ashlar (representing a crude, imperfect state) to the Perfect Ashlar (a stone ready by the hands of the workmen). Toil is the manual, repetitive, automatable work that lacks enduring value and scales linearly with service growth. SREs dedicate their time to engineering work (at least 50% of their focus) to write software that replaces this manual labor, ensuring staff scales sublinearly with system size.
     – Searching for Truth: Mastery Through Failure. The diligent worker must search to the foundations of knowledge to find the Truth buried under error. We explore SRE’s commitment to rigorous self-assessment, particularly through blameless postmortems following significant incidents. This practice is essential for finding the root causes of failures, improving systems, and making the organization more resilient as a whole.
     – The Discipline of the Craft: Understand the emphasis SRE places on high standards for workmanship and conduct. Just as the craft requires “virtuous education”, SREs prioritize continuous learning and structured training, including studying the liberal ARTS AND SCIENCES, to master the complexity of distributed systems. We look at how practicing mental discipline, combined with preparation exercises like disaster role-playing, aids in maintaining rational, focused, and deliberate cognitive functions during emergencies.
    This episode demonstrates that whether erecting physical edifices or building the world’s largest cloud services, success hinges on meticulous execution, relentless refinement, and an unwavering commitment to quality and Fidelity.

    Source #1: Duncan’s Masonic Ritual & Monitor (1866) by Malcom C. Duncan

    Source #2: Site Reliability Engineering edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy