https://secopsmachines.com/ Essays on running security operations as an engineering and reliability discipline: measuring and eliminating toil, designing sustainable on-call rotas, keeping runbooks correct as systems change, capacity planning for an operations function, and applying error budgets, blameless review and load shedding to security work. en https://secopsmachines.com/what-security-can-borrow-from-reliability-practice/ https://secopsmachines.com/what-security-can-borrow-from-reliability-practice/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Reliability Error budgets, blameless review and load shedding transfer into security operations, but only if you are precise about which quantity is being budgeted and which one is not yours to control. https://secopsmachines.com/keeping-a-runbook-true/ https://secopsmachines.com/keeping-a-runbook-true/ Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Runbooks A runbook is a copy of knowledge about a system that changes without telling you. Decay is structural rather than cultural, and the only reliable detector is execution. https://secopsmachines.com/the-rota-is-a-design-artefact/ https://secopsmachines.com/the-rota-is-a-design-artefact/ Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 On-call Most on-call schedules are the output of a spreadsheet and a headcount, not a design. Writing down what the rota has to achieve — before drawing it — changes the shape of the answer and the size of the team. https://secopsmachines.com/measure-the-toil-before-you-automate-it/ https://secopsmachines.com/measure-the-toil-before-you-automate-it/ Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Toil Ask an operations team what to automate and they name the task that annoys them most, which is almost never the task that costs them most. The gap between those two answers is the whole of the problem.