The latest News and Information on Service Reliability Engineering and related technologies.
Many organizations struggle to create data-driven cultures where each employee is empowered to make decisions based on data. This is especially true for enterprises with a variety of systems and tools in use across different teams. If you are a leader, manager, or executive focused on how your team can leverage Google's SRE practices or wider DevOps practices, definitely you are in the right place!
Reliability and chaos might seem like opposite ideas. But, as Netflix learned in 2010, introducing a bit of chaos—and carefully measuring the results of that chaos—can be a great recipe for reliability. Although most software is created in a tightly controlled environment and carefully tested before release, the production environment is harsher and much less controlled.
Ben Treynor Sloss, then VP of Engineering at Google, coined the term “Site Reliability Engineering” in 2003. Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, aims to build and run scalable and highly available systems. The philosophy behind Site Reliability Engineering is that developers should treat errors as opportunities to learn and improve. SRE teams constantly experiment and try new things to enhance their support systems.
Mature start-ups and scale-ups create wonderful and challenging environments for Engineers. As the product they’re creating matures and the brand becomes a successful one, the user base generally starts growing, and, for some companies, in places they might not expect it to grow. As that happens, new challenges arise for Engineers. One of these challenges is pretty straightforward to guess. Basically having a particular product available throughout different regions of the world.
On-call schedules ensure that there's someone available day and night to fix or escalate any issues that arise. Using an on-call schedule helps keep things running smoothly. These on-call workers can be anyone from nurses and doctors required to respond to emergencies to IT and software engineering staff who need to fix service outages or significant bugs. Being on-call can be challenging and stressful. But with the proper practices in place, on-call schedules can fit well into an employee's work-life balance while still meeting the organization's needs.
Ask most SREs how many incidents they’d have to respond to in a perfect world, and their answer would probably be “zero.” After all, making software and infrastructure so reliable that incidents never occur is the dream that SREs are theoretically chasing. Reducing actual incidents by as much as possible is a noble goal. However, it’s important to recognize that incidents aren’t an SRE’s number one enemy.
