Blameless recently had the pleasure of interviewing Yury Niño Roa, Site Reliability Engineer, Solutions Architect and Chaos Engineering Advocate at ADL Digital Labs. She’s worked in roles ranging from solutions architect, to software engineering professor, to DevOps engineer, to SRE. Additionally, Yury is an avid blogger and conference speaker who regularly presents at events such as Chaos Conf, DevOpsDays Bogotá, and more.

Onboarding is an essential yet challenging part of the hiring process. As your organization matures, more of its processes become unique. This makes it harder for new employees to get up to speed. Investing in custom processes and tooling to achieve your specific goals is a valuable practice. But, you must balance this with an investment in onboarding.

Atlassian JIRA, one of the most popular ticketing systems, allows teams to catalogue incidents, follow-up actions, bugs, stories, and more. As a common tool in any DevOps/SRE operation’s toolchain, JIRA is a key integration at Blameless. Blameless’ integration with JIRA allows teams to automatically generate a ticket within both Blameless and JIRA. This integration also allows teams to track follow-up actions via Blameless’ postmortem tool.

Adopting SRE principles into your organization can be a big undertaking. You’ll need to develop new practices and procedures to minimize the costs of incident coordination. You’ll need to create a retrospective process that encourages continuous learning. You’ll need to shift culture to begin appreciating failure as an opportunity to grow. Your transition to the world of SRE will also require buy-in from all levels of your organization.

BOO! Did we scare you? We couldn’t help it, we’re just so happy it’s spooky season. Here’s the October issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

When we talk about the reliability of services, SRE encourages us to take a holistic view. Unreliability in service delivery can be due to anything, from hardware malfunctions to errors in code. One source of unreliability that is often overlooked is security. A security breach can damage customer trust far beyond the impact of the breach itself. Even smaller infractions, like failing a service audit, can make users wary.

As you adopt SRE practices, you’ll find that there are optimization opportunities across every part of your development and operations cycle. SRE breaks down silos and helps learning flow through every stage of the software lifecycle. This forms connections between different teams and roles. Understanding all the new connections formed by SRE practices can be daunting. Building a model of SRE specific to your organization is a good way to keep a clear picture in your head.

Network Operation Centers, or NOCs, serve as hubs for monitoring and incident response. A NOC is usually a physical location in an organization. NOC operators sit at a central desk with screens showing current service data. But, the functionality of a NOC can be distributed. Some organizations build virtual NOCs. These can be staffed fully remotely. This allows for distributed teams and follow-the-sun rotations. NOC as a service is another structure gaining in popularity.