Rotation Design

Follow-the-sun, primary/secondary, and shadow rotations — on-call patterns that are sustainable.

6 min readSRE PlaybookOperate

Rotation Principles

On-call rotations must be fair, sustainable, and effective. Fair means everyone carries an equal share. Sustainable means the workload does not cause burnout. Effective means the right person is paged for the right issue.

Fairness is non-negotiable

An unfair rotation destroys team morale faster than anything else. Track on-call hours across the team. If one person carries more burden, rebalance immediately. Use data, not assumptions, to verify fairness.

Rotation Patterns

Pattern	Description	Best For	Tradeoffs
Weekly rotation	One person on-call for a full week	Small teams (< 8 people)	Long exposure, recovery time
Daily rotation	One person on-call per day	Medium teams (8-20 people)	Frequent context switching
Follow-the-sun	On-call follows daylight hours across time zones	Global teams	Complex handoffs
Primary/Secondary	Primary handles pages, secondary supports	All team sizes	Clear ownership, backup

Follow-the-Sun

Follow-the-sun splits the on-call rotation across time zones. Each time zone covers business hours in their region. This eliminates night pages but requires excellent handoff documentation.

Follow-the-sun PagerDuty schedule


schedule:
  name: "user-api-follow-the-sun"
  time_zone: "UTC"
  layers:
    - name: "Americas"
      start: "14:00 UTC"   # 9 AM Eastern
      end: "22:00 UTC"     # 5 PM Eastern
      users:
        - "sre-americas-primary"
        - "sre-americas-secondary"

    - name: "EMEA"
      start: "07:00 UTC"   # 9 AM CET
      end: "15:00 UTC"     # 5 PM CET
      users:
        - "sre-emea-primary"
        - "sre-emea-secondary"

    - name: "APAC"
      start: "23:00 UTC"   # 8 AM SGT
      end: "07:00 UTC"     # 4 PM SGT
      users:
        - "sre-apac-primary"
        - "sre-apac-secondary"

  handoff_rules:
    - "Post shift summary before handoff"
    - "Active incidents documented with context"
    - "Risky deploys flagged for next shift"
    - "Verify next shift acknowledges handoff"

Primary/Secondary

The primary/secondary pattern assigns one person as the primary responder and another as backup. The primary handles all pages. The secondary is paged only if the primary does not respond. This provides clear ownership with a safety net.

Primary/secondary PagerDuty schedule


schedule:
  name: "user-api-primary-secondary"
  time_zone: "America/New_York"
  layers:
    - name: "Primary"
      rotation: "weekly"
      users:
        - "alice"
        - "bob"
        - "charlie"
        - "diana"

    - name: "Secondary"
      rotation: "weekly"
      offset: "P1W"  # Offset by 1 week
      users:
        - "bob"
        - "charlie"
        - "diana"
        - "alice"

  escalation:
    primary:
      wait: 0
      notify: "PagerDuty"
    secondary:
      wait: 10m  # Page secondary if primary does not respond in 10 minutes
      notify: "PagerDuty + SMS"

  restrictions:
    max_primary_hours_per_month: 168  # ~1 week
    min_recovery_hours: 48  # At least 2 days off between rotations

Shadow Rotation

Shadow rotation pairs a new on-call member with an experienced one. The new member handles pages while the experienced member observes and provides guidance. This is how you onboard new team members into on-call safely.

Shadow rotation configuration


shadow_rotation:
  purpose: "Onboard new SREs to on-call"
  duration: "2 weeks"
  participants:
    shadow:
      role: "Primary responder"
      responsibilities:
        - "Acknowledge pages"
        - "Investigate issues"
        - "Execute runbooks"
        - "Escalate when needed"
    mentor:
      role: "Observer and advisor"
      responsibilities:
        - "Monitor shadow's response"
        - "Provide guidance when asked"
        - "Step in if shadow is stuck"
        - "Debrief after each incident"

  rules:
    - "Mentor does not take over unless shadow requests it"
    - "Mentor provides feedback after each page"
    - "Shadow documents their experience"
    - "End-of-rotation review with team lead"

  success_criteria:
    - "Shadow handles 80% of pages independently"
    - "Shadow escalation decisions are appropriate"
    - "Shadow confidence score >= 4/5"

Track on-call hours automatically

Use PagerDuty or Opsgenie reports to track actual on-call hours per person. Compare this to expected hours. If the distribution is uneven, adjust the rotation. Data-driven fairness prevents resentment.

Tooling Setup

Configure your on-call tooling to support the rotation design. Set up schedules, escalation policies, notification rules, and handoff templates. Automate as much as possible to reduce manual management.

PagerDuty notification rules


notification_rules:
  - name: "First page"
    trigger: "incident.triggered"
    delay: 0
    channels:
      - type: "push"
      - type: "sms"
      - type: "phone_call"

  - name: "Reminder"
    trigger: "incident.acknowledged"
    delay: 15m
    channels:
      - type: "push"

  - name: "Escalation"
    trigger: "incident.escalated"
    delay: 0
    channels:
      - type: "push"
      - type: "phone_call"

  - name: "Resolution"
    trigger: "incident.resolved"
    delay: 0
    channels:
      - type: "email"

On-call should not be a punishment

On-call is a core engineering responsibility, not a punishment for junior engineers. Rotate on-call across all levels. Senior engineers should carry on-call to model good response behavior and share knowledge.

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Stage 6 · Operate

On-Call Culture & Sustainability