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.