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 […]
Say Goodbye to Late-Night SRE Wake-Up Calls
Thousands of SREs, on-call engineers and DevOps pros all over the world dread nothing more than the late-night incident alert. The pager buzzing at 2:00 a.m. can cause panic for SREs and leave IT and DevOps teams with quite a mess to contain. But incident response doesn’t have to cause panic if you have the […]
Why Observability and Monitoring Matter to SREs
Site reliability engineers, or SREs, do many things. They help developers build reliability into applications. They manage SLAs and SLOs. They play a leading role in incident management and incident response. For all of these tasks, SREs draw heavily on observability and monitoring. Although other parts of the IT organization also typically help to manage […]
Does Shift Left Matter to SREs?
If you’re a software engineer, you’ve likely heard all about shift left, a practice that can streamline certain aspects of software development. But shift left isn’t just for developers. It can be equally valuable for site reliability engineers (SREs). Although the main mission of SREs is ensuring the reliability of software after it has been […]
SRE’s Guide to Pragmatic Incident Response
In my past experience as an SRE, I learned some valuable lessons about how to respond to and learn from incidents. If you want the TL;DR, I’ll summarize them here: Declare and run retros for the small incidents. It’s less stressful, and action items become much more actionable. Decrease the time it takes to analyze an […]
The Key Benefits of Observability for SREs
In today’s technology landscape, organizations strive to champion innovative ideas, techniques and technologies to achieve success and outshine their competitors. For this reason, site reliability engineering (SRE) has become one of the fastest-growing enterprise roles and a set of organizational practices for fast and reliable software delivery. SREs use various tools and practices at their […]
Site Reliability Engineers to the DevOps Fore
[pdf-embedder url=”https://devopsy.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/site-reliability-engineers-to-the-devops-fore.pdf”] Charlene O'Hanlon
Improving Resiliency by Creating Chaos
In the digital economy, preventing downtime is paramount. When digital systems fail, the consequences for business can be huge. The cost of downtime can run to thousands of dollars per minute for large businesses. That’s without taking into account the impact of customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage for the company and the IT careers involved. […]
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 […]
SREs Say AIOps Doesn’t Live Up to the Hype
What can you expect when investing in artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps)? Real-time visibility across huge volumes of information. Lightning-fast event correlation and anomaly detection. Automated remediation and self-healing, without Ops personnel having to lift a finger. It all sounds amazing—at least, if you believe the marketing hype. But do those kinds of AIOps […]
Code Ownership Is Key to Accelerate Debugging
App stability is a fundamental part of every app experience. Broadly speaking, app stability is a measurement of the number of total app sessions that are crash-free or the percentage of daily active users who do not experience an error. End users have little patience for apps that crash or fail. Every application, whether it’s […]
Survey Reveals Slight Decline in Level of SRE Toil
The amount of routine toil that site reliability engineers (SREs) perform declined slightly in the last year even though IT environments in general are becoming more complex to manage. An annual survey of 300 SREs conducted by Catchpoint, a provider of an IT monitoring platform, in collaboration with VMware and the DevOps Institute suggests that […]
Using Chaos Engineering to Build Resilient Systems
Over the past decade, chaos engineering has become one of the most popular approaches in DevOps. It’s uniquely adapted to complex cloud-based systems and has the potential to succeed where more conventional approaches may not. Chaos Engineering Explained Traditionally, DevOps teams worked with systems hosted on single servers. They would analyze logs with a fine-toothed […]
CloudBolt Adds Cloud Cost Tool to Hybrid Management Platform
CloudBolt Software this week added cost management capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds along with codeless integrations with additional platforms to its hybrid cloud management platform. Grant Ho, chief marketing officer for CloudBolt, said the Spring Release of the company’s platform, now generally available, enables IT operations teams to rely […]
Chicken Soup for the SLO
Since time immemorial, humans have struggled to communicate. From myth to the modern era, our most memorable stories often involve individuals or groups seeking to be understood in order to avoid conflict. Be it the biblical allegory of Babel to the more recent Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of “Darmok,” a deep fascination with […]
The Evolution of SRE and Developer Roles
As an industry, we’ve seen cultures and roles shift throughout IT teams — specifically, the role of ITOps site reliability engineers (SREs), various developer roles and the culture of DevOps. Most of these roles operated – or still operate – in silos, and didn’t understand (or care to understand) how each other’s role worked. More […]
How to Spot SRE Adoption Barriers
It’s no secret that site reliability engineering (SRE) adoption is growing. The operating model, it seems, is pivotal for digital transformations across the enterprise. According to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, 22% of respondents (up 7% from last year) cited SRE as the approach they need to continue automation in 2021. Common Adoption […]
Report: The State of DevOps Automation
In the race to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, organizations are encountering more incidents, more downtime, and longer resolution times. In fact, 90.4% of organizations saw an increase in incidents since the pandemic began, according to a recent Transposit report. In a completely digital economy, service downtime takes a higher toll. For ITOps teams, working remotely […]
Why Developers Should Care About Resilience
Recently, a friend reminded me of a joke we used to have when we were both developers at a huge software corporation (we won’t mention names, but back when printers were a thing, you probably owned one of theirs). We didn’t develop printers. We developed performance testing and monitoring tools. We were the dev team, […]
How the SRE Role Is Evolving
In recent years, site reliability engineering (SRE) has garnered much interest. In 2019, LinkedIn listed site reliability engineer as the second most promising job in the United States. Now, in 2021, the role continues to grow and evolve within many organizations. Initially spearheaded at Google and credited to engineer Ben Treynor, the strategy seeks smarter […]
Rapid Strategic SRE Assessments Accelerate IT Transformations
A Strategic SRE Assessment is critical in helping organizations successfully transform traditional IT operations to SRE Site reliability engineering (SRE) is rapidly becoming more important to organizations that need to scale IT operations while maintaining or improving reliability and security, and to modernize operations to match the growth of DevOps in the organization. Without sufficiently […]