Toil (SRE)
Manual, repetitive operations work that a machine could do and that grows with the service, such as restarts, manual deploys and copying data.
The term comes from Google’s SRE practice, which separates toil from real engineering work that leaves the system better. Toil is not bad because it is boring but because it scales with traffic and customers, so it eventually eats the team. Each item in a runbook that someone runs by hand every week is a candidate for automation; coding agents have made many of these small automations cheap.
Related terms
- Runbook: A short document that tells someone else how to run a system: where it lives, how to deploy, how to recover.
- On-call rotation: A schedule that names who responds to production alerts outside normal work, with an escalation path if that person does not answer.
- CI/CD: Continuous integration and continuous delivery: every change is built and tested automatically and can be released at any time.
