Site Reliability Engineering was never meant to be about firefighting, yet too many teams find themselves stuck in an endless cycle of pages, postmortems, and quick fixes. Why? Because SRE is full of hidden traps — patterns that look like best practices on the surface but slowly erode reliability, burn out engineers, and stall progress.

In this talk, we’ll expose the 7 Deadly Traps of SRE, from the obsession with chasing “five nines,” to the cult of on-call heroism, to the false comfort of tooling and checklists. For each trap, we’ll unpack why it’s so seductive, how it quietly sabotages your team, and what to do instead.

You’ll walk away with a clearer lens on the pitfalls holding SRE organizations back, and a practical playbook to help your team escape firefighting mode and reclaim the true purpose of SRE: building systems - and cultures - that are resilient, scalable, and human-friendly.

Miko Pawlikowski is an SRE Author and a platform engineer at Quadrature. He has led large-scale infrastructure and SRE initiatives at Citadel and Bloomberg, with deep expertise in Kubernetes, cloud computing, and chaos engineering. Passionate about building resilient systems and communities, he brings together engineers worldwide through conferences and media projects.