A day in the life of an SRE | Ashwin Murali
For the first post of this series of A day in the life of an SRE, we have Ashwin Murali.
He says on his website —
it's harder to write an intro piece for my website than it is to wrangle servers!
But we will still attempt it😆
Ashwin is the Cloud Infra and Engineering Manager at CoLearn. He is better known as cruisemaniac on the internet. He is one of the few people on earth who run their own mail servers. You can contact him and verify this at mail@ashwinm.net.
Let’s get started with our questions 🙌🏻
What is your work setup like? Are you a dual monitor / single monitor person? Which are the tools you cannot do without for day-to-day productivity?
Dual Monitor, Terminal, Jira, Slack. I keep changing between one of the 5-6 keyboards at will.
What does your typical day look like? Do you start with a dashboard and end with a dashboard? Any typical routine that you follow?
I start my day with alerts at 5 AM (He is in Abu Dhabi currently) as traffic spikes looking out for patterns that might cause concern.
Which are your go-to tools for debugging an incident?
New Relic, Cloudwatch logs, and alarms.
Any memorable incident you helped/tracked/fixed?
Performance tuning and fixing chokes in the request-response cycle are always fun. I have tons of stories to share.
We will hold true to your answer and get you to share more details with us :)
How many dashboards do you track over a day?
Around three to four.
What do you want from other team members from engineering that will help you in your job?
Know your metrics. If you don’t know your metrics, no one else will.
How do you manage burnout?
I love cycling a lot. I take a lot of breaks, go cycling and spend time with family.
If you were not an SRE, what would you be doing?
Hardware/firmware engineer for a mobile company somewhere.
Where can people find you online?
cruisemaniac - https://twitter.com/cruisemaniac
Thanks, Ashwin, for sharing your story with us! You can reach out to Ashwin on Linkedin , and his website.