# How SRE Teams Use Toil Budgets to Automate the Right Things

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923/how-sre-teams-use-toil-budgets-to-automate-the-right-things
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923/how-sre-teams-use-toil-budgets-to-automate-the-right-things.md
Podcast: [The Site Reliability Podcast with Fexingo: SRE, Uptime, and Production Engineering](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-site-reliability-podcast-with-fexingo-sre-uptime-and-production-engineering-7871923)
Published: 2026-07-16T10:12:41+00:00
Episode link: https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-site-reliability-podcast/episode-0114.mp3
Audio file: https://audio.fexingo.com/business/the-site-reliability-podcast/episode-0114.mp3
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Duration seconds: 616

## Resource

Episode 114 of The Site Reliability Podcast explores a concept that separates mature SRE teams from the rest: the toil budget. Lucas and Luna break down how teams at companies like Google and Shopify explicitly cap the amount of manual, repetitive work engineers spend each week — and what happens when you let teams decide which 30 percent of their toil to automate first. They walk through a real example from a mid-sized e-commerce platform that cut its on-call ticket volume by 60 percent after implementing a toil budget tied to a service-level objective. The episode also covers common failure modes: setting the budget too low, tracking toil wrong, and confusing cognitive overhead with toil. No vague advice — just a concrete framework any SRE team can steal. #SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #ToilBudget #Automation #GoogleSRE #DevOps #Uptime #IncidentResponse #OnCall #ServiceLevelObjective #PlatformEngineering #TechOps #ReliabilityEngineering #Observability #ProductionEngineering #IncidentManagement #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo

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