Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.

Postmark is a simple email delivery system used to send transactional and marketing emails and it ensures getting them delivered to the inbox on time, every time. It also helps in reducing email delivery time considerably. If you use Postmark for your email delivery requirements, you can integrate it with Squadcast, an end-to-end incident response tool, to route detailed alerts from Postmark to the right users in Squadcast. The below steps will help you set up Postmark and Squadcast integration.

All deployment strategies have pros and cons. Find out whether canary deployment is a good fit for your team by looking at how it works, and its best practices.

We spoke with two members from the SRE team, Alex Blyth and Zulhilmi Zainudin, to learn more about their role at Civo. Through this series, we aim to provide you with an overview of the different roles we have at Civo and what advice our team has. You can discover more about our team in our “day in the life of a Go Dev” and “day in the life of an Intern” blog.

CircleCI is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps in implementing DevOps practices. It is used to build, test, and deploy projects, by automating pipelines with jobs. If you use CircleCI for implementing your DevOps practices, you can now integrate it with Squadcast to route detailed alerts to the right users in Squadcast. The below steps will help you set up CircleCI and Squadcast integration.

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is a metric that transcends industry and technology. It’s a measure of how quickly, on average, support teams identify, act, and resolve IT issues and incidents. Because MTTR directly relates to service quality, maintaining a low MTTR is a critical goal for DevOps and SRE teams. These teams have a vested interest in resolving issues quickly because escalating incidents to higher levels of the support team increases response and resolution times.

I’ve had the honor and privilege of authoring The SRE Report for the last three years. For the 2023 version, this included working with some amazing individuals like Anna Jones, Kurt Andersen, and Steve McGhee. Download The SRE Report 2023 here (no registration required).

Incidents should be your best friend. It sounds like a controversial statement. It sounds like a lot of unnecessary work. The truth is, for companies engaged in delivering any online or digital experience, taking this point of view is absolutely E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L.

SRE is a constantly evolving field, responding to the challenges of increasing reliance on tech and the opportunities of its evolving abilities. Reliability has to remain a step ahead of the cutting edge, whether it’s navigating remote work, implementing AI assistance, or optimizing internal processes. But how do we know that SRE is keeping up? ‍ We’re proud and excited to announce the results of the SRE Survey we ran in partnership with Catchpoint.