Toil

Noun · Hacker Culture

Definitions

  1. Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales linearly with service growth and provides no enduring value. A key SRE concept — Google's SRE book recommends spending no more than 50% of time on toil, with the rest devoted to engineering work that reduces future toil.

    In plain English: Boring, repetitive ops work that could and should be automated away.

    Example: "Manually resizing disks every week is pure toil — let's write an operator that auto-scales PVCs based on usage."

Related Terms