We explain what software reliability testing is and how it works, how to conduct it, and how you can use it to identify problems in the software design process.

The role of SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, was first created by Benjamin Treynor in 2003 at Google after he was tasked with ensuring that their websites were available and reliable. The SRE is a multi-disciplined role that needs to have the ability to automate monitoring and observability across hundreds and thousands of complex systems.

Whether you’ve heard of or fully jumped on the DevOps or SRE bandwagon, you may have also wondered how the two relate. What’s the difference? Are they really just different ways of looking at the same problem? The term DevOps hit the market first, but SRE wasn’t too far behind. And though they have different origin stories, they both focus on autonomy, automation, and iteration. So why do these paradigms exist? And why do we need both? Let’s look at this further.

‘OKR’, which stands for ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ is a goal management framework designed to define goals and track outcomes. It differs from typical goal-setting techniques because the aim is to set very ambitious goals that encourage teams to flex their creativity. OKRs are used by Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other successful companies to create measurable goals, and to make sure team members are aligned and engaged.

We launched the first episode of a webinar series to tackle one of the major challenges facing organizations: on-call. SRE: From Theory to Practice - What’s difficult about on-call sees Blameless engineers Kurt Andersen and Matt Davis joined by Yvonne Lam, staff software engineer at Kong, and Charles Cary, CEO of Shoreline, for a fireside chat about everything on-call. As software becomes more ubiquitous and necessary in our lives, our standards for reliability grow alongside it.

This month I hit my 2-year anniversary with Blameless and as our industry progresses and matures, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back and review how far we have come and also ruminate on where we’re headed. Our shared vision at Blameless is to help engineering teams adopt reliability practices with ease and advance to a resilient culture.