Toil

Toil is manual, repetitive operational work that scales linearly with service growth and should be automated.

What is Toil?

In SRE, toil refers to operational work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, lacks enduring value, and scales linearly with service growth.

Toil characteristics

Manual, Repetitive, Automatable, Tactical, No enduring value, Scales with growth.

Common misconceptions

"All manual work is toil" — Not all manual work is toil
"Toil can be eliminated completely" — Goal is reduction
"Toil is bad work" — Normal but should be minimized