Google SRE Prodcast

In Season 7, Episode 3 of The Prodcast, hosts Jordan Greenberg and Steve McGhee sit down with William Holroyd, an Site Reliability Engineer specializing in regulated cloud, for an insightful and engaging discussion on navigating complex compliance landscapes. Together, they break down what it really means to run software in regulated environments—covering key concepts like data residency, access controls, key custody, and audit evidence across international frameworks like FedRAMP and GDPR.
Beyond explaining the technical guardrails embedded directly into cloud platforms, William highlights how software teams can stay ahead of compliance drift and reduce operational toil. If you anticipate entering a regulated market within the next three years, start designing for your jurisdictional boundaries today—building inside a compliance boundary early is far easier and more cost-effective than attempting to migrate into one later. Tune in for a fantastic conversation on modern cloud architecture!

Avery Pennarun, CEO and co-founder of Tailscale, joins the Prodcast to discuss reliability, enterprise scaling, and engineering philosophy. This episode discusses how taking responsibility for user networking and edge cases builds long-term product reliability. Avery also talks about how AI tools can improve psychological safety, reduce noise, and serve as an information spine for teams

Daniel Hobe, SRE leader for Search, Geo, and DeepMind at Google, joins hosts Steve McGhee and Matt Siegler to discuss the unique engineering and cultural challenges of maintaining reliability for products with billions of users.
This episode explores the evolution of release processes—from traditional canary gating and A/B testing to the complexities of monitoring non-deterministic AI models and generative features.
The discussion highlights a shift in modern SRE: moving beyond abstract SLO percentages to measure real human impact, ensuring that engineering decisions remain tightly aligned with business goals and user experience. Hobe also offers an inspiring perspective on how AI can serve as an engineering enabler to tackle long-standing technical debt and enhance system resilience.
Whether you're scaling traditional infrastructure or navigating the new paradigm of AI-driven products, this episode offers essential lessons on risk management, observability, and customer-centric engineering. Join us as we kick off our seventh season!

Google's Tech Incident Response Team (IRT) manages the complex production environment during times of intensive change. In this episode, IRT member Adam Kramer talks about the importance of psychological safety to ensure that engineers can communicate effectively.

Courtney Nash of The VOID discusses the role of human expertise in managing complex systems, and how SREs continue to bring critical value even as technology and AI evolve.