Chaos engineering is a practice where engineers simulate failure to see how systems respond. This helps teams proactively identify and fix preventable issues. It also helps teams prepare responses to the types of issues they cannot prevent, such as sudden hardware failure. The goal of chaos engineering is to improve the reliability and resilience of a system. As such, it is an essential part of a mature SRE solution.

The biggest benefit of SRE isn’t always the processes or tools, but the cultural shift. Building a blameless culture can profoundly change how your organization functions. Your SRE team should be your champions for cultural development. To drive change, SREs need to embody a growth mindset. They need to believe that their own abilities and perspectives can always grow, and encourage this mindset across the organization.

What precisely are the requirements of a DevOps practitioner, as opposed to an SRE, legacy developer, or operations manager? And do those specific requirements require a different approach to monitoring?

Even if you don’t notice, you are executing runbooks everyday, all the time. When you have an incident in your day-to-day operations, you follow a series of ordered and connected steps to solve it. For instance, if you lose your internet connection, you will follow a series of steps to resolve that issue: This could be different depending on your method, but you have the idea.

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.

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.

What a difference a year makes. In a matter of 365 days, the entire planet stared down at uncertainty, and while most of the world is far from recovered, we are starting to see a time where some level of normalcy will return. But what will this look like? How will the past year transform our social interactions, our time out of the house, and how we conduct business?

People sometimes think that implementing Site Reliability Engineering (or DevOps for that matter) will magically make everything better. Just sprinkle a little bit of SRE fairy dust on your organization and your services will be more reliable, more profitable, and your IT, product and engineering teams will be happy. It’s easy to see why people think this way. Some of the world’s most reliable and scalable services run with the help of an SRE team, Google being the prime example.

Is love in the air? We think so. While we don’t have chocolate or flowers for you, we have something just as sweet. Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this February.

Incidents that disrupt services are unavoidable. But every breakdown is an opportunity to learn & improve. Our latest blog is a deep dive into best practices to follow across the lifecycle of an incident, helping teams build a sustainable and reliable product - the SRE way As the saying goes, “Every problem we face is a blessing in disguise”.