How SRE Makes Electric Vehicles
summary
Rivian applies SRE practices to manufacturing by building an automated provisioning and observability platform: PXE/pixie for OS installs, AWX + Ansible for configuration, Docker containers on IPCs, Prometheus/Grafana for metrics, and a custom VNC tool called Sauron. A first flip provisions 45 IPCs in nine hours; later improvements drop that to under an hour for 45 and scale to 1300+ devices. Remaining pain is vendor firmware — custom BIOS requiring two human touch points — and air‑gapped networking constraints.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Start
- 2:06First - A Short Story
- 5:12Challenges
- 9:18Starting to Solve Problems - An Adventure
- 11:20The Manual Quagmire
- 13:23SSH Hits the Fan
- 16:17"Automated" Process
- 17:18Manual Bites Back
- 17:54What does it look like today?
- 21:10Observability
- 22:30Custom VNC Tooling
- 24:06Biggest Win
- 26:06So whats next?
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