Implementing SRE is fundamentally about shifting culture, but it often means adding new tooling and processes to your team's workflows to support that cultural change. Teams add new steps and checks to incident response procedures. Incident responders write retrospectives and create new meetings to review them. Engineers consult new tools like monitoring dashboards and SLOs. In other words, SRE creates another layer of consideration in development and operations.

In the reliability era, many services are migrating from in-house servers to the cloud. The cloud model allows your service to capitalize on the benefits of large hosting providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. These servers can be more reliable than in-house servers for reasons including: However, as with all things, cloud providers present their own risks and challenges as well. Teams will want to take advantage of the benefits while accounting for these limitations.

In the world of SRE, incidents are unplanned investments in reliability. Why? Because they are valuable opportunities to learn and grow. This perspective can be difficult to communicate to other stakeholders. Some may be upset about the cost incurred or the affected customers. Others might not understand why incidents happen in the first place. It is important to show how the lessons of an incident are relevant to each stakeholder role.

New year, new SRE! We’ve said goodbye to 2020 and hello to 2021. Here’s some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community so far this year.

Downtime costs more than dollars. It also costs customer happiness and trust. So how do teams maximize for reliability while scaling? Tooling, communication, observability, and more all play into a complete reliability strategy. In a recent industry leaders’ roundtable hosted by Blameless, top experts discussed best practices for responding to incidents, scaling for reliability, and how to engineer with the customer in mind.

Delivering great software and sustainable systems is a team sport. Without the support of all stakeholders, adoption initiatives often fail. In successful initiatives, SREs are responsible for bringing together all resources and team members to help resolve reliability-related issues. But getting together these resources takes much more effort than people think. SREs engage in lots of glue work to ensure these collaborative efforts happen.

One of the most versatile and foundational SRE tools is the SLO, or service level objective. The SLO is a threshold set for key reliability metrics. When incidents push the metric over the threshold, a response launches to prevent further damage. Conversely, as long as you meet your SLO, you can continue to ship new code. The space you have before you breach this threshold is the error budget.

As reliability shifts left, more companies are adopting SRE best practices. These best practices don’t only include conducting incident retrospectives. The heart and soul of these best practices are a blameless culture and a desire to grow from each incident. In a recent industry leaders’ roundtable hosted by Blameless, top experts discussed how teams can embrace SRE best practices and make cultural shifts towards blamelessness.