GAME-DAY

SRE / DevOps concept Game day (SRE exercise).

Definition

A game day is a ritualised exercise (typically 1 per quarter) where the SRE team plans a failure scenario (AWS zone down, certificate expired, saturated database), executes it in production or realistic staging, and observes the response chain — alerting, on-call, runbook, MTTR. Lessons captured in a retro.

Origin

Practice formalised by Amazon and Google from the 2010s, popularised by John Allspaw at Etsy.

Example in context

EDI Q4 game day: simulation of top-3 supplier AS2 certificate expiration, measure of incident-command response time.

Related terms

• Chaos engineering — parent discipline.