Is it a coincidence that “May” and “yay” rhyme? Probably not. This month has been pretty exciting for us here at Blameless, and we’d love to share why. We also have some of our favorite Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this month.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps share a goal of building a bridge between development and operations. We'll explore and compare both approaches. Wondering to yourself, which is better for your company, SRE or DevOps? Neither SRE or DevOps is “better,” exactly, since they’re similar yet different in a few key ways: SRE, or site reliability engineering, is a methodology developed by Google engineer Ben Treynor Sloss in 2003.

Onboarding a new tool can be boring. Or stressful. Or both. When onboarding an incident response tool, it can be difficult to make sure that your team is getting the most from the experience. Do you opt for a run-of-the-mill meeting, or try to learn while in an incident? Neither option is ideal. That’s why Petal’s DevOps Engineer Michael Cole found a new way to get his team using Blameless for their incident response process.

How available is your website, service, or platform? What must you monitor and measure to ensure availability? How do you translate uptime into availability? This chart has numbers that every Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) should know. Below the chart, you will find answers to commonly asked questions about SRE and associated metrics.

When I asked Charlie for permission to attend this year’s AICon (virtual, natch) I thought it would be a shoo-in; learning’s part of my OKRs after all. But he never makes things easy and his ‘yes’ came with a caveat that’s typical when dealing with him. This time, he claimed he didn’t have the budget for the ticket (a likely story!) and I’d have to find another way to get one.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are a key component of any successful Site Reliability Engineering initiative. The question is, what are SLOs; and how do you determine what your SLOs should be? Once you've done that, how should you use them?

Blameless recently had the privilege of hosting SRE leaders Garima Bajpai, Founder at Community of Practice - DevOps Canada and Jason Fraser, Delivery Lead at VMware Tanzu to discuss the value of crisis during incident response, the best and worst tech transformations they’ve seen, how reliability impacts the flow of value, and more.

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.

Let's all face it, on call work isn't fun. But it can be better. Even if you have to work on call, it would be nice to have at least some of the work done for you, before you drag yourself out of bed at 3am to respond to an incident.