toil term
manual, repetitive operational work that scales with service size
Google SRE definition: manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as your service grows. Restarting servers, rotating logs by hand, walking through runbooks. SRE caps toil at ~50% of an SRE's time so engineering work doesn't get crowded out. Eliminating toil is the engineering project.