Ask most SREs how many incidents they’d have to respond to in a perfect world, and their answer would probably be “zero.” After all, making software and infrastructure so reliable that incidents never occur is the dream that SREs are theoretically chasing. Reducing actual incidents by as much as possible is a noble goal. However, it’s important to recognize that incidents aren’t an SRE’s number one enemy.
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have a considerable set of tasks to juggle no matter where they work or how long their company has had an SRE practice. But if you’re the very first SRE to join an organization – as many SREs are these days, given that the SRE trend is trickling down into smaller and smaller companies – you face a special group of challenges. You may find it difficult to get buy-in for SRE from other technical teams.
What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive Site Reliability Engineering turn out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question that teams at about 400 businesses have presumably had to ask themselves this month in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud.
To embed or not to embed: That is the question. At least, that’s one of the questions that companies have to answer as they decide how to implement Site Reliability Engineering. They can either embed SREs into existing teams, or they can build a new, separate SRE team. Both approaches have their pros and cons. The right strategy for your company or team depends, of course, on your needs and priorities.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams and Platform Engineering teams share similar goals -- like maximizing automation and reducing toil -- and similar methodologies. But they have different priorities, and use somewhat different tools to achieve them. What are SREs, what are platform engineers and how is each role similar and different? This article explains.
If you’re an SRE, you might view AIOps with great excitement. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. Alternatively, SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain. They might think of AIOps as just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t live up to its promises, and that can become a distraction from the SRE tools that really matter. Which perspective is right?
When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you? That’s a question that engineers rarely step back to consider. The rational, disciplined parts of our minds tell us that the playbooks we are supposed to follow were carefully designed and tested, and that we should stick to them at all costs.
When you think of who uses feature flags, your mind most likely goes to developers. In general, feature flags are closely associated with software engineering. But Site Reliability Engineers, too, can benefit from feature flags. SREs may not be the ones to create feature flags, but they should work closely with developers to ensure that the applications their teams support include feature flags.
A list of the top nine SRE skills, from incident management, to cloud computing, to networking and beyond.
From alerting to during to post incident, great communication is the key to effective incident response.
