AIOps for SRE — Using AI to Reduce On-Call Fatigue and Improve Reliability
Site reliability engineering (SRE) has become an emergent niche practice invented at Google to become a foundation of contemporary enterprise performance worldwide. With the continued growth of microservices, a multi-cloud infrastructure and continuous deployment pipelines adopted by organizations, the operational surface area has increased to the extent that human personnel cannot monitor and manage it in real time. The effectiveness […]
From Cloud to Cognitive Infrastructure: How AI is Redefining the Next Frontier of SRE
As organizations embrace artificial intelligence (AI) workloads alongside traditional cloud systems, site reliability engineering (SRE) must evolve to manage an entirely new class of infrastructure — intelligent, hybrid and graphics processing unit (GPU)-driven. Infrastructure has transformed dramatically over the past two decades. We began with physical servers in local data centers, then virtualization improved efficiency […]
The Breakneck Future of Codegen: Why AI SWE Must Be Matched with AI SRE
AI codegen is transforming software development — but as speed and complexity increase, so does fragility. AI for site reliability will need to keep pace to avoid system breakdown and engineer burnout.
When Metrics Overwhelm: How SREs Help Engineers Reclaim Focus
Observability promised insight but delivered alert fatigue. Learn how SREs are redefining observability to empower developers and restore real engineering value.
Zero-Trust, Full Stack: Embedding Cybersecurity Principles Into Site Reliability Engineering Culture
These days, with digital threats everywhere, cybersecurity must evolve beyond just being a perimeter measure. Given the rapid delivery of software and the transient nature of infrastructure, security must be built into DevOps. This shift presents both a challenge and an opportunity for site reliability engineers (SREs) to apply zero-trust principles everywhere, starting with infrastructure […]
Focus on Basics or Innovation? DevOps Success Requires Both
DevOps teams are experiencing a chasm between traditionalists and innovators — a rift that grows as pressure mounts for teams to leverage the latest advancements. Traditionalists are fighting to preserve the basics, to carry an appreciation for the early days of DevOps, and to not cut corners (look no further than CrowdStrike).
Building an Open Source Observability Platform
By investing in open source frameworks and LGTM tools, SRE teams can effectively monitor their apps and gain insights into system behavior.
Harnessing AI for Automated and Toil-Free SRE
AI not only reduces toil but also contributes to improving system reliability, efficiency and scalability, forming a critical part of modern SRE practices.
Revolutionizing the Nine Pillars of SRE With AI-Engineered Tools
In my blog Rapid Strategic SRE Assessments Accelerate IT Transformations published last year, I classified site reliability engineering (SRE) into nine pillars of SRE practices—a comprehensive framework that covers the full scope of SRE practices. This nine pillars SRE framework is consistent with the SRE blueprint published by the DevOps Institute. Each of these pillars […]
Why SREs Are Critical to DevOps
Although a relatively new concept, site reliability engineers (SREs) have become crucial for DevOps teams, helping to solve an array of operational problems such as network availability and user experience. However, in previous years, some people have questioned the longevity of such a role. This article will discuss several reasons why site reliability engineering roles […]
Best of 2022: Day in the Life of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022. By now, most of us are familiar with the concept of site reliability engineering (SRE). The term was originally coined by Google and SRE has […]
SRE Survey Reveals Major Technical and Cultural Challenges
Catchpoint, in partnership with Blameless, today published an annual survey of 559 site reliability engineers (SREs) that found 59% of respondents didn’t view tool sprawl to be a major concern. Another 40% said tool sprawl is a moderate (33%) to serious problem (8%). More than half of respondents said they build as much as 30% […]
Scaling Predictive Analytics With AIOps to Drive Next-Gen SRE
Enterprise systems are only as valuable as they are reliable, in the sense that they don’t suffer excessive breakdowns. Otherwise, companies experience costly downtime and added stress for engineers due to the additional burden of managing issues. This critical function of ensuring systems run reliably and optimally, at production scale and with minimum human intervention, […]
5 Ways to Prevent an Outage
In today’s always-on, ever-connected world, we all expect 100% availability. What gets in the way of this? The devil is in the details. Over time, everything breaks: Disks, nodes, containers, networks, DNS servers and configuration issues can all lead to major outages. Amazon’s 13 minutes of downtime in August 2021 translated to almost $5 million […]
Why More Incidents Are Better
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 the number of actual incidents as much as possible is a noble […]
How to Adopt an SRE Practice (When You’re not Google)
Site reliability engineering (SRE) isn’t a new term or practice. The practice of applying software engineering skills and principles to operations problems and tasks happened even before site reliability engineer was a defined job title. But organizing a proactive approach to building and maintaining software drives long-term success in improving operational efficiency, data-driven roadmap planning […]
The Pros and Cons of Embedded SREs
To embed or not to embed: That is the question. At least, that’s one of the questions that companies have to answer as they decide how to implement site reliability engineering. They can either embed SREs into existing teams, or they can build a new, separate team. Both approaches have their pros and cons. The […]
The Evolution of Incident Management
Have you ever thought about the history of incident management? If you’re an SRE, you might be so caught up in the day-to-day work of managing reliability and responding to incidents that you never take time to step back and reflect on the evolution of your role and your responsibilities. And that’s a shame because […]
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Comes of Age in 2022
The site reliability engineer (SRE) role is still gathering steam across organizations. In January 2022, LinkedIn listed SRE as the 21st job with the highest global demand throughout the past five years. That’s pretty high for such a specific tech role. And, looking to the future, it appears the SRE practice will only continue to […]
Defining Availability, Maintainability and Reliability in SRE
In the world of reliability engineering, you’ll frequently encounter the three “-ability” words: Availability, maintainability and reliability. They sound similar and have similar meanings. In fact, these words may seem so similar that it can be tempting to use them interchangeably. That would be a mistake. Availability, maintainability and reliability all have distinct—if related—meanings, and […]
Where Do SREs Go From Here?
Charlene O’Hanlon talks with Leo Vasiliou, director of product marketing at Catchpoint, about the results of a study the company fielded with VMWare Tanzu and DevOps Institute of nearly 300 site reliability engineers (SREs). This year’s report underscores the challenges of multi-cloud, calls out the underutilization of AIOps and shows a systemic shift in core […]
4 Ways to Overcome Agile Transformation Obstacles
If an organization desires a successful Agile transformation, the first step is to shift its thinking from ‘doing Agile’ to ‘being agile.’ Unfortunately, a commonly shared belief that Agile is just a software development methodology keeps too many companies stuck in the ‘doing Agile’ mindset. This belief ties back to the principles of Agile thinking […]
SREs: Stop Asking Your Product Managers for SLOs
One of the fundamental premises of software reliability engineering is that you should base your reliability goals—i.e., your service level objectives (SLOs)—on the level of service that keeps your customers happy. The problem is, defining what makes your customers happy requires communication between software reliability engineers (SREs) and product managers (PMs) (aka business stakeholders), and […]