>>If anything, the article might actually persuade me that it was all bloat.
Not for me
This is almost exactly like the new manager coming in, noticing that the floors and surfaces are all clean, all the systems work, the trash is emptied, etc., and so deciding that the entire maintenance staff is unnecessary and firing them.
The place doesn't become a decrepit pigsty the next morning; it slowly degrades.
Same for these systems. They were designed, built, tuned, and maintained over the course of years to go from requiring constant manual intervention to running largely unattended and with a good buffer of ready hardware and automatic failover for failures. That "largely" in "largely unattended" is doing some very heavy lifting.
The system WILL require human intervention to keep running, and more than just a skeleton crew. The only question is whether it will happen before the new crew gets up to speed to handle the inevitable degradation.
This does NOT mean that the SREs were bloat - it means that they were doing an excellent job and could safely take a break. We're now in just the two-week vacation zone - same as if the entire SRE team went on a holiday. We'd expect it to work. Now let's see what happens in two months.
Not for me
This is almost exactly like the new manager coming in, noticing that the floors and surfaces are all clean, all the systems work, the trash is emptied, etc., and so deciding that the entire maintenance staff is unnecessary and firing them.
The place doesn't become a decrepit pigsty the next morning; it slowly degrades.
Same for these systems. They were designed, built, tuned, and maintained over the course of years to go from requiring constant manual intervention to running largely unattended and with a good buffer of ready hardware and automatic failover for failures. That "largely" in "largely unattended" is doing some very heavy lifting.
The system WILL require human intervention to keep running, and more than just a skeleton crew. The only question is whether it will happen before the new crew gets up to speed to handle the inevitable degradation.
This does NOT mean that the SREs were bloat - it means that they were doing an excellent job and could safely take a break. We're now in just the two-week vacation zone - same as if the entire SRE team went on a holiday. We'd expect it to work. Now let's see what happens in two months.