SRE advocates addressing problems blamelessly. When something goes wrong, don’t try to determine who is at fault. Instead, look for systemic causes. Adopting this approach has many benefits, from the practical to the cultural. Your system will become more resilient as you learn from each failure. Your team will also feel safer when they don’t fear blame, leading to more initiative and innovation. Learning everything you can from incidents is a challenge.

Chaos engineering is a practice where engineers simulate failure to see how systems respond. This helps teams proactively identify and fix preventable issues. It also helps teams prepare responses to the types of issues they cannot prevent, such as sudden hardware failure. The goal of chaos engineering is to improve the reliability and resilience of a system. As such, it is an essential part of a mature SRE solution.

The biggest benefit of SRE isn’t always the processes or tools, but the cultural shift. Building a blameless culture can profoundly change how your organization functions. Your SRE team should be your champions for cultural development. To drive change, SREs need to embody a growth mindset. They need to believe that their own abilities and perspectives can always grow, and encourage this mindset across the organization.

Even if you don’t notice, you are executing runbooks everyday, all the time. When you have an incident in your day-to-day operations, you follow a series of ordered and connected steps to solve it. For instance, if you lose your internet connection, you will follow a series of steps to resolve that issue: This could be different depending on your method, but you have the idea.

In the software industry’s recent past, the biggest disruptive wave was Agile methodologies. While Site Reliability Engineering is still early in its adoption, those of us who experienced the disruptive transformation of Agile see the writing on the wall: SRE will impact everyone. Any kind of major transformation like this requires a change in culture, which is a catch-all term for changing people’s principles and behaviors.

In the beginning, there were flight controllers. These were a strange breed. In the early days of the US Manned Space Program, most american households, regardless of class or race, knew the names of the astronauts. John Glen, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong. The manned space program was a unifying force of national pride. But no-one knew the names of the anonymous men and later, women, who got the astronauts to orbit, to the moon, and most importantly, got them back to earth.

Is love in the air? We think so. While we don’t have chocolate or flowers for you, we have something just as sweet. Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this February.

When implementing SRE, almost every role within your IT organization will change. One of the biggest transformations will be in your Quality Assurance teams. A common misconception is that SRE “replaces” QA. People believe SLOs and other SRE best practices render the traditional role of QA engineering obsolete, as testing and quality shift left in the SDLC. This leads to QA teams resisting SRE adoption.

We live in the era of reliability. The most important feature for a service is how dependable it is in the eyes of a user. Companies are hiring with this in mind. In a 2019 LinkedIn article, site reliability engineers were listed as the 2nd most promising career in the United States. But how do you get started as an SRE? In this blog post, we’ll look at: SRE is a multifaceted role. You will contribute to an organization's code base, policy, culture, and more.