Distributed systems such as microservices have defined software engineering over the last decade. The majority of advancements have been in increasing resilience, flexibility, and rapidity of deployment at increasingly larger scales. For streaming giant Netflix, the migration to a complex cloud based microservices architecture would not have been possible without a revolutionary testing method known as fault injection. With tools like chaos monkey, Netflix employs a cutting edge testing toolkit.

As your organization’s reliability needs grow, you may consider investing in SRE tools. Tooling can make many processes more efficient, consistent, and repeatable. When you decide to invest in tooling, one of the major decisions is how you’ll source your tools. Will you buy an out-of-the-box tool, build one in-house, or work with an open source project? This is a big decision. Switching methods half-way through adoption is costly and can cause thrash.

Blameless is excited to announce an enhancement to our Incident Retrospective tool! The Export feature now allows for customizable retrospectives.

By adding new complexity to reliability engineering and making physical war rooms a thing of the past, COVID-19 has imposed permanent changes on incident management. Here’s how SREs can respond.

An important SRE best practice is analyzing and learning from incidents. When an incident occurs, you shouldn’t think of it as a setback, but as an opportunity to grow. Good incident analysis involves building an incident retrospective. This document will contain everything from incident metrics to the narrative of those involved. These metrics aren’t the whole story, but they can help teams make data-driven decisions. But choosing which metrics are best to analyze can be difficult.

A selection of live questions and answers from the audience of our recent webinar on how site reliability engineers can best leverage intelligent observability to monitor SLIs and SLOs, prioritize reliability over functionality, and more.

Is it spring yet? Or spring still? Time sure is strange nowadays. At least we have a ton to look forward to in the next few weeks! Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this month.

After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.

As more people depend on your product, reliability expectations tend to grow. For a service to continue succeeding, it has to be one customers can rely upon. At the same time, as you bring on more customers, the technical demands put on your service increase as well. Dealing with both the increased expectations and challenges of reliability as you scale is difficult. You’ll need to maintain your development velocity and build customer trust through transparency.

Blameless’ Incident Resolution chatbot is getting a makeover. We’re excited to share how this change came about, what the revamp includes, and how Blameless customers can get the most out of it.