Part of the trepidation of being on-call is encountering unfamiliar emergency scenarios where we are surprised by suddenly not knowing how to do our jobs. We feel lost and alone, complicated by the world around us, powerless to resolve or even mitigate the problem. On-call need not be a solo affair full of fear and anxiety. There are ways we can employ practice and open collaboration outside of incidents to prepare us better.

We talk about reliability a lot from the context of software engineering. We ask questions about service availability, or how important it is for specific users. But when organizations face outages, it becomes immediately obvious that the reliability of an online service or application is something that impacts the entire business with significant costs. A mindset of putting reliability first is a business imperative that all teams should share.

As organizations progress in their reliability journey, they may build a dedicated team of site reliability engineers. This team can be structured in two major ways: a distributed model, where SREs are embedded in each project team, providing guidance and support for that team; and a centralized model, where one team provides infrastructure and processes for the entire organization.

Amazon EventBridge is an AWS serverless event bus service making it easier to build event-driven applications. It uses events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and other AWS services. It delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources to target services like AWS Lambda. You can also set up routing rules to determine the destination where you wish to send the data and build decoupled application architectures.

As the new year approaches, we at Blameless like to ponder the future of Reliability Engineering. For 2021, we predicted that the practice of site reliability engineering (SRE) would continue to grow in terms of adoption, we would see adoption increase faster among smaller organizations, and SRE practices would get more attention to drive adoption compared to hiring. We’re sure you’ll agree that these trends have indeed strengthened in the last year.

Wondering about Incident Management Software? We explain the best incident management software tools and how they work.

Automation takes repetitive tasks off professionals’ plates, empowering them to free up time to focus on more valuable activities. Moogsoft’s API-driven automation capabilities enable SREs to make better use of their time, leading to better results for the business.

Asking an IT engineer or SRE to define the purpose of observability is kind of like asking someone to explain the purpose of life: There are lots of different opinions out there, and no way of proving any of them right or wrong. You could argue that observability is just a buzzword that refers to what used to be called monitoring.

SREs face special challenges during the holidays. Here’s how to manage them.

An explanation of observability that highlights the role observability data play in supporting the active role of SREs as they reduce toil, improve uptime, and judiciously consume the error budget.