toil
/toyl/ · noun · Development · Origin: 2016
Definitions
Repetitive, manual, automatable operational work that scales linearly with service size and provides no enduring value. Google's SRE framework defines toil precisely: it's tactical, not strategic; manual, not automated; and it interrupts rather than advances engineering work. SRE teams aim to keep toil below 50% of their time.
In plain English: Repetitive, boring operational tasks that could be automated but aren't yet — the stuff that eats engineers' time without making anything permanently better.
Example: Manually restarting the service every Monday morning because of a memory leak isn't heroism — it's toil. Fix the leak.
Related Terms
- Toil
- DevOps
- SRE
- Container
- Deployment
- Incident Management
- Monitoring
- Supervisor
- On-Call Rotation
- Toil
- Load Testing
- Tail Latency
- Crontab
- Symlink
- Environment Variable
- Backfill
- Runbook
- OOM Killer
- Connection Leak
- Code Freeze
- DNS Propagation
- RED Method
- Golden Signals
- Helm Template
- Toolchain
- Vagrant
- Virtual Device
- Infrastructure as Code Culture