On-call and incident response — the language of production engineering
Lesson 2 of 5 in Cloud & DevOps Communication — AWS, Azure, GCP · 22 minutes
Production engineers are on-call. When systems break, structured communication matters. This lesson covers on-call patterns and incident communication.
What you'll learn
- Manage on-call rotations effectively
- Communicate during production incidents
- Conduct incident command
- Run blameless post-mortems
From the lesson
On-call is core to production engineering. When something breaks at 2 AM, you respond. Strong on-call practice combines technical skill with structured communication. This lesson covers the patterns IEPs need.
1. The on-call rotation
How on-call works: • Engineers take turns being primary responder. • Typical: 1-week rotations. • Compensation varies: extra pay, time off, additional vacation. • Some companies pay $50-200/week for primary on-call.
Tools: • PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps for alerting. • Slack for team communication. • Zoom or Google Meet for incident bridges. • Datadog, New Relic, etc. for observability.
On-call expectations: • Respond within target time (15-30 minutes typically).…