Modern systems are built in a culture of technological excess: infinite scaling, endless tooling, growing abstraction layers, and permanent optimization.
For decades, the industry relied on Moore’s Law and continuous hardware growth. But as software complexity keeps increasing, SREs increasingly face the hidden costs of this gluttony: cognitive overload, operational fragility, rising cloud costs, operational entropy, and systems that nobody fully understands anymore.
Drawing from real-world experience in SRE, GreenOps, and FinOps initiatives, this talk explores operational sobriety as an engineering discipline. Inspired in part by the “erooM” perspective, improving systems through software efficiency rather than endless hardware expansion, we will discuss how reducing unnecessary complexity can help build systems that remain understandable, resilient, and sustainable over time.
The future of reliability may depend less on endless accumulation than on rediscovering the culture of economy, efficiency, and resilience that originally shaped engineering itself.
Brice Le Roux is a cloud architect, GreenOps expert, and SRE/DevOps consultant focused on sustainable and resilient information systems.
He works on reliability engineering, sustainable infrastructure, cloud governance, and operational sobriety, and trains architects and engineers on Kubernetes and eco-designed architectures.
