On-Call
The practice of designating specific team members to be available to respond to urgent system issues outside of standard working hours.
The practice of designating specific team members to be available to respond to urgent system issues outside of standard working hours.
You Build It, You Run It
Modern DevOps culture promotes "You Build It, You Run It." This means the developers who write the code are also the ones who wake up when it breaks. This aligns incentives: if you write buggy code, you are the one who gets paged, so you write better code.
ExSeries B SaaS On-Call Implementation
"15-person engineering team implemented on-call rotations. Started with 1 person per week, high burnout. Evolved to 2-person teams (primary + secondary) with 12-hour rotations. 6 months later: 60% fewer escalations, 40% faster MTTR."
Why On-Call Matters
Software runs 24/7; bugs don't respect office hours.
Essential for maintaining SLAs.
Common Pitfalls
Build Your Schedule
Benchmark against industry standards and identify improvement opportunities.