Meet the Google team that saved Pokémon Go and Home Depot's Thanksgiving (GOOG, GOOGL)

But Rensin couldn't go: He had to stay home, on the couch, with his laptop, working to keep the game's servers running as the unforeseen crush of users rendered the whole thing unplayable for millions.

Normally, this wouldn't be Google's problem, let alone Rensin's specifically. While

"Who cares about the rest of your [system] if you can't rely on it?" Rensin asks.

Rensin's big idea was simple. Take those SRE engineers — all experts in site reliability — and embed them with customers, for free. The whole sales pitch behind Google Cloud is to give people access to Google's infrastructure; this so-called Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) program would help customers build systems the way Google does, too.

"When you join our cloud, we get married. And we have a child: It's called your system," Rensin tells Business Insider. And Pokémon Go became the first time this CRE team would get in the saddle.

We are all Pokémon SRE"

The CRE program was supposed to start at the end of 2016. But after Pokémon Go developer Niantic appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Rensin and members of the CRE team flew to Home Depot HQ in Atlanta and worked around the clock to meet that tight deadline. On Thanksgiving night, Rensin got a text from his Home Depot contact: "You know what I'm doing right now?"

Rensin braced for the worst, mentally preparing for a trip back to Atlanta to help triage a disaster scenario. But no: He just wanted Rensin to know that, for the first time in years, he was able to enjoy a quiet Thanksgiving dinner with his family.

Whats next

From there, the CRE team was firmly established, and now boasts a "very large" backlog of people waiting to take advantage — though Google has partners like Pivotal and Rackspace, similarly trained in the ways of the CRE, that you can pay to "skip the line" and get similar expertise, as Rensin puts it.

The actual practice of working with the CRE team is like going on a diet, also as Rensin puts it: Customers can commit to it at various levels, from having Google consult on your infrastructure, all the way to "running joint operations" that involve co-building the tools for monitoring and maintenance.

Even if you're hesitant to commit all the way, Rensin says, "you're better off than you were" — hopefully, he says, you've picked up the skills you need to build a system that's closer to Google's standard of reliability.

The real takeaway, Rensin says, is that Google has more experience at this, sure, but the skills refined by the SRE team can be learned by anybody, if you have a willingness to learn by doing. Even Google's most elite engineers picked it up from somewhere.

"We don't genetically engineer our SREs," jokes Rensin.

Meet the Google team that saved Pokémon Go and Home Depot's Thanksgiving (GOOG, GOOGL)

We are all Pokémon SRE"

Whats next

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