In the era of reliability, where mere minutes of downtime or latency can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, 24x7 availability and on-call coverage to respond to incidents has become a requirement for the vast majority of organizations. But setting up an on-call system that drives effective incident response while minimizing the stress placed on engineers isn’t a trivial task.

Jacob Scott is an experienced engineer and enthusiastic participant in the resilience engineering community, having spent time caring for the technology systems powering high-growth startups as well as unicorns like Lyft and Stripe. He is deeply passionate about how to apply learnings from modern safety science to real, complex socio-technical systems.

When developing for reliability or implementing resilient DevOps practices, the heart of your decision-making is data. Without carefully monitoring key metrics like uptime, network load, and resource usage, you’ll be blind to where to spend development efforts or refine operation practices. Fortunately, a wide variety of monitoring tools are available to help you collect and get visibility into this data.

Service ownership is becoming common practice and its benefits are well-known. These perks include happier customers, aligned teams, and fewer incidents. While this sounds great, it’s often easier said than done, requiring a culture and mindset shift. Leadership will need to encourage and empower teams to adopt the “you build it, you run it” mentality. Here are some ways leaders can help get teams on board.

Here’s the July issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

Service ownership is becoming a best practice for teams looking to innovate while maintaining the level of reliability that customers expect. Service ownership means seeing the service through its entire lifecycle. In short, it means you build it, you run it. You’ll be responsible for the service’s security, reliability, performance, and quality. This doesn’t mean you won’t have help from SREs to optimize or automate toil.

Are you looking to get up to speed on SRE fundamentals with the best SRE books and best DevOps books? Or are you hoping to expand your SRE knowledge into new domains? Either way, we’ve got you covered in our list of essential SRE resources!

What happens when you receive a notification that something is wrong with your system and you have no clue what it means, or why you’re receiving that alert? Maybe you have to parse through the alert conditions to suss out what the alert indicates, or maybe you need to ping a coworker and ask. Not knowing what to do with an alert also contributes to alert fatigue, because it increases the toil and time required to respond.

Blameless CEO Ashar Rizqi recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dustin Pearce in a virtual executive fireside chat and AMA. Dustin is an experienced leader in scaling hyper-growth, cloud-native companies, as the VP of Infrastructure at Instacart and having previously served as Head of Service Engineering at Slack.

With the extreme changes we’ve all been through these last several months, it should come as no surprise that our jobs have changed drastically, too. We’re working remotely. We’re dealing with increased resource constraints. Our services are receiving more traffic than usual, and we’re tasked with keeping things up and running. Our work-as-done may not match what we did at the beginning of 2020.

With decreased resources, increased stress and cognitive load, and social distancing policies, many teams are under extreme pressure. Without over-communication and special attention paid to organizational culture, teams can become fractured, anxious, or disillusioned.

With the difficulties we’re facing during this time, it can be difficult to keep up with the increasingly vast demand for our services. You need to make use of all the tools in your toolbelt in order to conserve your team’s cognitive resources. Two ways you can do this are through automating toil from your processes and prioritizing with SLOs.

Between COVID-19 and the typical summer slow down, offices are emptier than they’re ever been. With team members taking some much-needed time off, it’s important to know how your team will be affected. Here are some tips to help your teams function during this time of flux.

Incident classification is a standardized way of organizing incidents with established categories. Incidents can include outages caused by errors in code, hardware failures, resource deficits — anything that disrupts normal operations. Each new incident should fit into a category dependent on the areas of the service affected, and in a ranking of the severity of the incident. Each of these classifications should have an established response procedure associated with it.

CEO Ashar Rizqi had the pleasure of being a guest on Google Cloud OnAir, a Google Cloud Customer Interview Series. Ashar and interviewer Jimmy Sopko discussed how Blameless has extended our runway using Google Cloud and Google Kubernetes Engine and how the team cultivates a culture of site reliability in a changing world.

SRE is a practice adopted by best-in-class companies all over the world. As a software reliability platform purpose-built for SREs, Blameless strives to practice what we preach and utilizes SRE best practices daily to cultivate a culture of resilience. However, this wasn’t always the case.

In our previous panel, we spoke about how to overcome imposter syndrome in high tempo situations, and how culture directly affects the availability of our systems. Building on that last discussion, we gathered leading minds in the resilience industry to discuss how SRE can manage systems complexity, and how that's tightly intertwined with business health especially in the context of current health and social crises.

This is the second article of a two-part series. Click here for part 1 of the interview with Brian, Carrie, JP, and Zac to learn more about Twitter’s SRE journey. Previously, we saw how SRE at Twitter has transformed their engineering practice to drive production readiness at scale. The concept of service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets have been key to this transformation, as SLOs shape an organization’s ability to make data-oriented decisions around reliability.