Toil is a term coined by Google which describes the repetitive and tedious tasks associated with running a production service. Toil tends to be manual and devoid of any long-term value. Toil is not just ‘work I do not like to do’. Each time an engineer engages with a production system, it represents time devoted to toil. These types of tasks get worse as your service grows even more extensive. Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) should spend less time on toil.

“It’s too expensive!” “Do we really need another tool?” “Our APM works just fine.” With strapped tech budgets and an abundance of tooling, it can be hard to justify a new expense—or something new for engineers to learn. Especially when they feel their current tool does the job adequately. But, does it?

As systems continue to become more complex, reliability is becoming an increasingly important requirement. Organizations are quickly realizing that making reliability a critical part of their service means that other organizations will be less likely to cut costs on them. As a result of this, the field of service reliability engineering (SRE) has grown rapidly over the past few years.

SLOs or Service Level Objectives are the foundation of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). To correctly understand SLOs, the first step is to understand Service Level Indicators or SLIs. SLIs are metrics that measure the vitals of the service. These vitals are chosen based on two conditions. First, they are the features that the user is primarily concerned about. Second, they allow the engineering team to get an overview of the system’s health.

By investing in a CI/CD pipeline, it’s entirely possible to automate a large part of the software development life cycle – letting businesses deliver high-quality, high-efficiency outputs with a faster time to market. But there are multiple elements to the CI/CD process, including the all-seeing eye that is continuous validation. So what exactly is continuous validation, and why should software developers bother to engage with it?

Continuous documentation is the process of creating and maintaining code documentation incrementally throughout a project in a way that seamlessly incorporates it into the development workflow. It is a key part of improving reliability within an organization. It’s not just new features that need to be documented – anything useful from bug fixes, to how to get started using the code should be documented. It should also be updated frequently to ensure that it stays relevant.

There is a distinctive gap opening up between the top engineers and the rest. The elite engineers represent the top few percent of engineering teams and are making incredible gains year on year in velocity, reliability, and human compatibility, whilst the bottom 50% are losing ground. The loss has nothing to do with engineering ability.

At CircleCI, CI has a second meaning: Continuous Improvement. We continuously seek out feedback not only to improve our code but to improve our processes and get better at our jobs along the way. This Continuous Improvement starts with one important company value: a blameless culture. Our blameless culture extends into every part of how we operate.