The last ten years have seen a massive change in how IT operations and development enable business success. From virtualization and cloud computing to continuous delivery, continuous integration, and rapid application development, IT has never been more complex or more critical to creating competitive advantage. To support increasingly Web-Scale IT operations and wide-scale cloud adoption, applications now operate as services.
Kubernetes makes it easier in certain ways to manage reliability. But incident response teams and SREs must also be prepared to handle the unique reliability challenges that K8s creates.
In the new world of rapid releases, continuous change, and increasingly high user expectations, more organizations are embracing DevOps. One of the primary drivers for adopting DevOps is speed — particularly the reduction of risk at speed. As DevOps seeks to reduce risk and deliver insight at an increasingly faster pace, new tools have emerged in the monitoring space. But these tools alone will not deliver us into the low-risk world of DevOps — not without new and updated thinking.
How can creating chaos achieve better reliability? Chaos and reliability might seem mutually exclusive, but through the use of Chaos Engineering, SREs can bring about meaningful changes to system resiliency.
Keeping digital services reliable is more important than ever. When something goes wrong in production, on-call teams face significant pressure to identify and resolve the incident quickly – in order to keep customers happy. But it can be difficult to get the right signals to the right person in a timely fashion.
SREs may have better long-term job prospects, but DevOps might be an easier career to pursue.
Site Reliability Engineers are expected to know everything that’s happening, all of the time. That’s a lot of things! To help you sift through the noise, we’ve developed a feature that lets you find accurate data about your organization on-demand. You can do this by sending custom-designed commands to FireHydrant directly from your integrated Slack account.
The Suez Canal has been big news over the last couple of weeks. We wondered how a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) might conduct a postmortem on what happened with the Ever Given, and what that might mean if a comparable incident occurred at a modern tech company.
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.
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.
