Unreliable services can affect businesses in myriad ways, from slowed development velocity, to unhappy users, to impacted revenue streams. Reliability often takes a backseat to feature releases and other business initiatives that drive development requirements. This post will discuss key elements of SRE practice that you can use to instill a reliability-first culture in your organization, while also meeting business requirements and keeping your users happy.

The OnPage Customer Support team consists of knowledgeable, friendly technicians that offer 24/7 assistance. Support recognizes the importance of client relationships and always aims to achieve maximum customer satisfaction. The OnPage incident management system is at the center of Support’s quality service delivery. OnPage triggers instant, critical mobile alerts to technicians whenever customer-initiated tickets are created.

What is DevOps? DevOps is a term for a cluster of concepts that has become a movement, “a cross-disciplinary practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating, rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” (Jez Humble) The definition of DevOps is not agreed upon by everyone because of the complex processes attached to the term, however, the benefits to teams are universally agreed upon.

In the software industry’s recent past, the biggest disruptive wave was Agile methodologies. While Site Reliability Engineering is still early in its adoption, those of us who experienced the disruptive transformation of Agile see the writing on the wall: SRE will impact everyone. Any kind of major transformation like this requires a change in culture, which is a catch-all term for changing people’s principles and behaviors.

If you’re investigating an incident, every minute means degraded performance or even downtime for customers. The causes of an issue often come from parts of your systems and applications that you would not think to check, and the sooner you can bring these to light, the better.

In the beginning, there were flight controllers. These were a strange breed. In the early days of the US Manned Space Program, most american households, regardless of class or race, knew the names of the astronauts. John Glen, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong. The manned space program was a unifying force of national pride. But no-one knew the names of the anonymous men and later, women, who got the astronauts to orbit, to the moon, and most importantly, got them back to earth.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) can mean different things to different companies; and operators that are responsible for reliability typically use a DevOps toolset. However, one thing is certain: SREs combine the skills of software engineers and production and operations management, to achieve high reliability and ensure that SLO/SLA targets are met. So SREs not only need to get a firm grip on the technologies involved in the system, but also on the intricacies of production deployments.