Incident retrospectives (or postmortems, post-incident reports, RCAs, etc.) are the most important part of an incident. This is where you take the gift of that experience and turn it into knowledge. This knowledge then feeds back into the product, improving reliability and ensuring that no incident is a wasted learning opportunity. Every incident is an unplanned investment and teams should strive to make the most of it.

We live in the era of software convenience, where we take for granted that hundreds of services are always at our fingertips. These applications become part of our daily routines because they are so reliable. However, this consistency makes reliability work invisible to the end user. It can be difficult to appreciate the effort behind maintaining a high availability service. Because of that, people may misunderstand exactly what makes a service reliable.

We live in an era of reliability where users depend on having consistent access to services. When choosing between competing services, no feature is more important to users than reliability. But what does reliability mean? To answer this question, we’ll break down reliability in terms of other metrics within reliability engineering: availability and maintainability. Distinguishing these terms isn’t a matter of semantics.

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

Blameless recently had the privilege of hosting some fantastic leaders in the SRE and resilience community for a panel discussion. Our panelists discussed testing in production, how feature flagging and testing can help us do that, and how to get managers to be on board with testing in production. The transcript below has been lightly edited, and if you’re interested in watching the full panel, you can do so here.

Site reliability engineering is a multifaceted movement that combines many practices, mentalities, and cultural values. It looks holistically at how an organization can become more resilient, operating on every level from server hardware to team morale. At each level, SRE is applied to improve the reliability of relevant systems. With such wide-reaching impact, it can be helpful to take time to reevaluate how to improve the reliability of a system.

With complex architectures, gaining visibility into systems is becoming more difficult. Additionally, with the move to remote work, it’s more important than ever before to adapt to new modes of work such as asynchronous collaboration. So how do we adjust to these changing times? In a CIO panel hosted by Lightspeed Venture Partners, industry experts came together to discuss these questions. Below are key insights from their conversation.

SLOs are key pillars in organizations’ reliability journeys. But, once you’ve set your SLOs, you need to know what to do with them. If they’re only metrics that you’re paged for once in a blue moon, they’ll become obsolete. To make sure your SLOs stay relevant, determine error budgets and policies for your teams. In this blog, we’ll look at the basics of error budgeting, how to set corresponding policies, and how to operationalize SLOs for the long term.

As you implement SRE practices and culture at your organization, you’ll realize everyone has a part to play. From engineers setting SLOs, to management upholding the virtue of blamelessness, to marketing teams conducting retrospectives on email campaigns, there’s no part of an organization that doesn’t benefit from the SRE mentality.