Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’ve had the honor and privilege of authoring The SRE Report for the last three years. For the 2023 version, this included working with some amazing individuals like Anna Jones, Kurt Andersen, and Steve McGhee. Download The SRE Report 2023 here (no registration required).

Let's be honest, nobody loves surveys. Ok, well I sure don't. But surveys satisfy a huge need in our demand for insights into complex human-computer, sociotechnical systems. It turns out that we've been measuring the computer part pretty well, but the humans – not as easy to keep track of. When Google SRE first defined toil as a metric we wanted to reduce, we spent far too long trying to quantify it numerically based on tooling and insights from computer systems.

A guide to set practical Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for your Site Reliability Engineering practices.

One of the key attributes of DevOps and SRE engineers is their ability to meticulously observe and monitor all of their applications. A task which can be achieved more efficiently by centralizing all generated logs to a central endpoint. By centralizing logging, engineers can, at any time, have an accurate overview of all events which take place across their applications, from just one place. Storing logs in an external system also allows companies to ensure compliance with many certifications.

There is a famous quote that goes like this…‘For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.’ At least in the world of incident response, nothing is more apt than this. Digital infrastructure these days is made up of multiple services, an outage could result from either one impacted service or multiple impacted services. So it's essential to have a catalog of all the services along with the point of contact (service owner) responsible for maintaining it.

It may surprise you to hear, but Honeycomb doesn’t currently have a platform team. We have a platform org, and my title is Director of Platform Engineering. We have engineers doing platform work. And, we even have an SRE team and a core services team. But a platform team? Nope. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to build a platform team up from scratch—a situation some of you may also be in—and it led me to asking crucial questions. What should such a team own?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers 100+ services, each focusing on a specific area of functionality. However, it can be challenging to pick the right services for the task and also to provision them. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, lets you easily deploy and manage applications without the need to learn about the underlying infrastructure that runs these applications.