#66 - Unpacking 2025 SRE Report’s Damning Findings

About this episode

The episode discusses the findings of the 2025 SRE Report and the challenges organizations face in defining and achieving reliability.

I know it’s already six months into 2025, but we recorded this almost three months ago. I’ve been busy with my foray into the world of tech consulting and training —and, well, editing these podcast episodes takes time and care. This episode was prompted by the 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report , which dropped some damning but all-too-familiar findings: * 53% of orgs still define reliability as uptime only , ignoring degraded experience and hidden toil * Manual effort is creeping back in , reversing five years of automation gains * 41% of engineers feel pressure to ship fast , even when it undermines long-term stability To unpack what this actually means inside organizations, I sat down with Sebastian Vietz , Director of Reliability Engineering at Compass Digital and co-host of the Reliability Enablers podcast. Sebastian doesn’t just talk about technical fixes — he focuses on the organizational frictions that stall change, burn out engineers, and leave “reliability” as a slide deck instead of a lived practice. We dig into: * How SREs get stuck as messengers of inconvenient truths * What it really takes to move from advocacy to adoption — without turning your whole org into a cost center…

People in this episode

Host: Ash Patel

Guest: Sebastian Vietz

Topics covered

• SRE Report
• reliability
• organizational change
• automation
• engineering pressure
• security and compliance

Keywords

• SRE
• reliability
• Catchpoint
• automation
• engineering
• organizational frictions
• tech consulting

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Catchpoint, Compass Digital

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• You (and AI) can't automate reliability away · December 2, 2025 · 28 min
• #67 Why the SRE Book Fails Most Orgs — Lessons from a Google Veteran · July 15, 2025 · 31 min
• #65 - In Critical Systems, 99.9% Isn’t Reliable — It’s a Liability · June 17, 2025 · 28 min
• #64 - Using AI to Reduce Observability Costs · January 28, 2025 · 21 min
• #63 - Does "Big Observability" Neglect Mobile? · November 12, 2024 · 29 min