This talk will detail the anti-pattern where traditional operations are rebranded as “SRE” but everything else stays nearly the same. The same tools, processes, and interactions persist. SRE is seen as a mandate without any real change. In practice, the only change is the team’s renaming.

Across the industry, one of the most common, if not the most common, anti-pattern is the renaming X to Y. Considering it generically, it’s when we rebrand something but little else changes. It’s the act of rebranding a team or practice and, in practice, things stay almost the same. Like many other changes in the past that fell into this trap, SRE is not immune to it. As a new way of doing operations, it's easy to fall into this anti-pattern. Essentially, the rebranding anti-pattern is characterized by little to no change. It’s an anti-pattern where companies, at best, gain marginal improvements in the way they do operations and fail to capitalize on them. We’ll explore this in detail and what strategies we can employ to overcome to avoid this anti-pattern.

Principal Site Reliability Engineer at FanDuel/Blip.pt. MSc in Computer Science by the University of Porto. CK{AD, A, S} by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) | Linux Foundation. {Terraform, Consul, Vault} Associate by HashiCorp. Working daily to build high-performance, reliable and scalable systems. DevOps Porto meetup co-organizer and DevOpsDays Portugal co-organizer. A strong believer in culture and teamwork. Open source passionate, martial arts amateur, and metal lover.