Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:
The statement “Toil is not important work” is NOT an SRE principle. This is incorrect based on the official Google SRE documentation. In the Site Reliability Engineering Book, toil is treated as a critical concept, because identifying and reducing toil directly enables reliability improvements and more engineering-focused work. The SRE book emphasizes that toil must be taken seriously and systematically reduced, but never dismissed.
From the SRE Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:
“Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, with no enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”
The SRE book further emphasizes:
“SRE teams should measure toil, track it, and make constant efforts to reduce it.”
This demonstrates that toil is significant and should not be ignored. Therefore, any suggestion that “toil is not important work” contradicts the documentation.
The other answer choices are actual SRE principles:
Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”
Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”
Automate what is currently done manually — Automation is a central SRE philosophy to reduce toil.
Reduce the cost of failure — Error budgets and controlled risk-taking are core SRE concepts designed to reduce the cost of failure.
Thus, the only option that is NOT an SRE principle is C.
[References:, Site Reliability Engineering Book, “Introduction” and “Eliminating Toil” Chapters, SRE Workbook, “Eliminating Toil” Section, , ]
