Everything is DevOps
It’s funny how we in IT tend to be absolutists, shoving everything into the current bucket. XML was going to eliminate programming—even though it wasn’t even particularly good at data representation. NoCode was going to eliminate programming (yeah, that’s a theme, I’ll skip the other 50 or so ‘going to end programming’ cycles we’ve been […]
The Rogers Outage of 2022: Takeaways for SREs
When, eight years from now, folks are creating lists of the top IT incidents of the 2020s, there’s a good chance that they’ll include the Rogers outage of 2022. The failure, which made internet and cellular network service unavailable for more than 12 million users across Canada, was one of the most significant outages in […]
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 […]
Simplifying DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
Let’s face it, tools for infrastructure-as-code (IaC) configuration management may be vital, but they’re difficult to use. But what if it’s not so much the tools themselves as it is our understanding of them? What if we looked at provisioning and configuration systems differently and did so using vocabulary that was less confusing and more […]
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 […]
5 Mean-Time Reliability Metrics To Follow
Most folks working in DevOps or SRE roles are familiar with metrics like mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR). Keeping track of the average time a team takes to respond to incidents is crucial to identifying bottlenecks in the support process. It’s also something executives like to show higher-ups when sharing a snapshot of overall platform performance. However, focusing […]
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 […]
5 Tips If You’re the First SRE Hire
Site reliability engineers (SREs) have a considerable set of tasks to juggle no matter where they work or how long their company has had an SRE practice. But if you’re the very first one to join an organization—as many SREs are these days, given that the trend is trickling down into smaller and smaller companies—you […]
Survey Surfaces Challenges Ahead on National DevOps Day
A survey published today for National DevOps Day found nearly two-thirds (63%) have seen an increase in the frequency of service incidents that have affected their customers over the course of the last 14 months. The survey polled 1,046 engineering, IT operations, DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) professionals at organizations with more than 300 […]
What SREs Can Learn From the Atlassian Outage of 2022
What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive site reliability engineering turns out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question teams at about 400 businesses presumably asked themselves in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud. The incident offers a number of insights for […]
Increasing Use of SLOs to Enable Observability
Observability is a growing discipline among most IT and operations departments. To release stable software faster, operators need continuous visibility into metrics like performance, uptime and availability. As a result, engineers are increasing their use of service-level objectives (SLOs) across the board—a recent study found that 82% of companies are increasing their use of SLOs. […]
Shedding Light On Toil: Ways Engineers Can Reduce Toil
It comes in many shapes and sizes and is embraced as a necessary evil. It lurks in the shadows, emerging now and again to stealthily creep into our workflows, where it feasts on our perceived shame. If not pruned, it grows and wraps its tendrils around the workforce, draining the energy out of every digital […]
SRE Vs. DevOps: The Wrong Question?
The age-old question about the competition between DevOps and SRE sets up a false dichotomy. DevOps is a methodology while SRE is a team within operations. Although the two are often pitted against one another, developers also embody the skills and the capabilities to implement fixes. Traditionally, application changes were reactive. The process of SRE […]
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 […]
Survey Shows Shift to SRE Principles to Automate IT Management
A global survey of 1,500 IT decision-makers conducted by F5 found that, on average, organizations are managing more than 200 applications deployed across an extended enterprise as well as more than 20 different security and delivery technologies. Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist in the Office of the CTO for F5, said that level of complexity […]
Harness Acquires ChaosNative to Meld Chaos Engineering, DevOps
Harness this week announced it acquired ChaosNative as part of a plan to more deeply integrate chaos engineering with DevOps workflows. At the same time, the company added a Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) and Harness Security Testing Orchestration capability to its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. Chaos engineering, as a discipline, refers to experiments […]
Secure Software Summit: Applying Chaos Engineering to Software Security
Today’s software systems are, essentially, controlled chaos—and lightly controlled chaos, at that. This makes it exceptionally challenging to model the behavior of those systems. Our systems are quickly becoming larger and larger, with more and more moving parts. It is not uncommon for enterprises to have over 1,000 microservices and millions of containers running thousands […]
What Does AIOps Mean for SREs?
It seems SREs are of two minds when it comes to AIOps. On one hand, AIOps’ potential is pretty exciting. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. But on the other hand, some SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain and distrust. They might […]
Analyzing SRE Job Postings
You can find plenty of high-level definitions out on the internet about what site reliability engineering means and what site reliability engineers do. But if you want to understand what it’s actually like to work as a site reliability engineer, there is perhaps no better source than job descriptions. SRE job ads explain what real […]
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 […]
CNCF Takes LitmusChaos Platform to the Incubation Level
The technical oversight committee (TOC) for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced today it is elevating the open source LitmusChaos application testing platform to the incubation level. LitmusChaos is a chaos engineering platform donated to the CNCF by ChaosNative in 2020. Since then, it has seen adoption within production environments by more than 25 […]
Best of 2021 – Hiring When You’re Not FAANG
As we close out 2021, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the twentieth in our series of the Best of 2021. Most of us are not FAANG, and we shouldn’t act like we are. Instead of using that, I’m going to use the term we used […]