On-call is a powerful tool for engineering teams. Here are some strategies for building more effective, sustainable on-call rotations.
If you manage teams that run software in production, whether you have an end-user-facing web app or an internal service aimed at developers, at some point you’ll probably have to create an on-call rotation for that software.
The way you manage this rotation will have a big impact on your user experience and company reputation (it’s much less embarrassing to discover and fix issues yourself than to hear complaints about your uptime on Twitter). It will also, of course, have a significant impact on the work and lives of the people on call.