SREs Tasked With More To Improve Digital Experiences
The digitization of the enterprise has never moved so swiftly, and never have enterprise environments been as complex to manage. And, never have more businesses been as dependent on their infrastructure and operations being unfaltering. According to a new survey and accompanying report from Catchpoint and the DevOps Institute, site reliability engineers (SREs) and teams […]
Why is Site Reliability Engineering Important?
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is one of the fastest-growing enterprise roles and set of operational practices for managing services at scale. During the Site Reliability Engineering SKILup Day June 18, I asked a group of the DevOps Institute Ambassadors why SRE was important to them. Below you will find some insightful responses, tips and calls […]
A Thousand Salutes to SREs: Unsung Heroes of the Pandemic
Applications are the lifeblood of a modern business, and uptime is crucial — even more so during a pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that we can adapt to a new normal. It has also shown us that customers will take their business elsewhere if an application experience does not meet their expectations. The […]
Measuring DevOps Performance
As IT becomes increasingly central to our organizations, it is increasingly important to improve our ability to deliver innovations efficiently and safely. DevOps is a movement to reimagine the way we deliver software, with an emphasis on delivering value to end users through automation and collaboration. In the midst of complex changes to complex processes, […]
Site Reliability Engineering 101: DevOps Versus SRE
Consider the following scenario. An Independent Software Provider (ISV) developed a financial application for a global investment firm that serves global conglomerates, leading central banks, asset managers, brokerage firms and governmental bodies. The development strategy for the application encompassed a thought through DevOps plan with cutting-edge agile tools. This has ensured zero downtime deployment at […]
SRE (Part 1): A Modern Overview
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a topic that over the last several years has become a popular discussion across many companies I have interacted with. This article is the first of two that I’m passionate to share, as I’ve come across many organizations who are trying to build and implement this ideology, while all are […]
Top Six Open Source Tools for Monitoring Kubernetes and Docker
Kubernetes and Docker are two of the most commonly heard buzzwords in modern DevOps conversations. Docker is a tool that enables you to containerize and run your applications, and Kubernetes provides you with a platform to orchestrate or manage these containers—since managing thousands of containers manually using the Docker CLI would be a practical nightmare. […]
SRE Is the Most Innovative Approach to ITSM Since ITIL
For over a decade, ITIL has been the leading ITSM framework adopted by enterprises across the globe. So, what is driving a rapidly increasing interest in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as a service management alternative? In its own words, Google refers to SRE as its approach to service management: “The SRE team is responsible for […]
Emerging Patterns in SRE Implementation
First we were told that every company will become a technology company. Then the tides shifted to every company will become a DevOps company. Now the zeitgeist has a new obsession: Every company will become a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) company. Have you been keeping pace? If your company survived the ruthless restructuring of digital […]
The SRE Pressure Cooker: Balancing Velocity Against Risk
Delivering fast, reliable digital services today is a lot like Olympian alpine skiing. These services must deftly maneuver a series of perilous passages en route to end users, all while maintaining the astounding speed we now take for granted. In an SRE’s world, those passages are today’s increasingly complex and interconnected internet infrastructure through which […]
Blameless Launches DevOps Platform Based on SRE Principles
Blameless has emerged from stealth to launch a platform for managing DevOps based on the site reliability engineering (SRE) best practices defined by Google. Fresh off raising an additional $20 million in funding, the Blameless platform provides across-the-board visibility into the complex network of application programming interfaces (APIs) and applications distributed across an organization, said […]
How SRE Creates a Blameless Culture
People in tech love to praise failure as essential to innovation. But at far too many organizations, when failure happens, it is punished. When an IT system goes down, an individual or a team is immediately ID’d, blamed and shamed. This is counterproductive. Blame damages companies by creating a play-it-safe atmosphere and stifling innovation; even […]
4 Predictive Analytics Challenges Facing SRE Teams
“Predictive analytics” refers to the many techniques used to analyze data to make predictions about the future, such as data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Being able to predict technical and business outcomes is one of the main promises of big data. Indeed, many businesses have invested heavily in infrastructure to anticipate […]
SRE vs. DevOps — a False Distinction?
Just a few days before he died at the beginning of the 1990s, a wise man taught us that “the show must go on.” Freddie Mercury’s parting words have long provided the guiding light for many, if not all, ops teams. In their eyes, the production environment should be exposed to minimum risk, even at […]
SRE vs. DevOps vs. Cloud Native: The Server Cage Match
This post supports my DevOpsDays Austin Presentation on May 4 I don’t believe in DevOps shaming. Our community seems compelled to correct use of DevOps as an adjective for tools, teams and teapots. The frustration is reasonable: DevOps clearly taps into head space for both devs and operators who see a brighter automated future together. […]
Is Site Reliability Engineering the True ‘Ops’ in DevOps?
I recently had the privilege of attending the SRECon conference in San Francisco. It’s in its third year and 650 attendees gathered to learn and share their experiences, insights and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices. Most SRECon attendees either identified as SREs or were there to learn more about this new role and approach. While […]
Making Performance More Than a Best Practice
Yes, you read that correctly: SRE means that strong application performance—speed, reliability and availability—no longer is simply a best practice. It is a must. Site reliability engineering, or SRE, is a term Google coined several years ago, and while there is no universal definition, SRE can be thought of as a discipline that blends software engineering […]