Playbook
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A Playbook is like a runbook but bigger — it covers a whole category of operations, not just one specific scenario. If a runbook is 'how to restart the database,' a playbook is 'how to handle all database-related incidents.' Playbooks set the strategy; runbooks are the specific plays.
Real Talk
A playbook is a higher-level operational document that covers strategies and procedures for a category of situations, such as 'security incident response' or 'disaster recovery.' It contains multiple runbooks and decision trees. The term is sometimes used interchangeably with runbook depending on the team.
When You'll Hear This
"Check the security playbook before responding to that alert." / "Create a deployment playbook so any engineer can do a safe production deploy."
Related Terms
Incident Response
Incident Response is the process your team follows when production breaks. Who gets paged? Who's the incident commander?
On-call
On-call means it's your turn to be the person who gets woken up at 3am if production breaks.
Runbook
A Runbook is a step-by-step guide for handling a specific operational task or incident.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
SRE is Google's version of DevOps with a more engineering-focused twist.