What Is Resilience Engineering?
Admitting things will go wrong isn’t easy for anyone or any team. But modern engineering practices have moved beyond this fear, giving birth to a new practice in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) known as resilience engineering. Resilience engineering today isn’t thought of as a function. However, just as DevOps was a description of […]
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 […]
How To Build a Culture of Resilience Through Good Habits
Good habits are hard to form. I’ve been listening to the audiobook “Atomic Habits“ by James Clear on my morning runs, and something struck me. At Gremlin, along with our software, what we’re trying to promote are positive new habits for our customers. According to the author, one of the primary reasons new habits don’t […]
Survey Finds SRE Role Remains Largely Aspirational
Monitoring tools provider Catchpoint, in collaboration with the DevOps Institute, has published a survey that finds there is a significant gap between the tasks and duties that define the role of what a site reliability engineer (SRE) should be versus what is actually occurring within IT organizations that have hired SREs. Based on a survey […]
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 […]
DevOps and AIOps: Better Together
DevOps is an attempt to scale technology with humans but AIOps is the ultimate answer. In today’s world, where so many essential business tasks have become digitized, IT teams must deal with constant change while ensuring zero downtime. The irony is that, although IT has become business-critical, the productivity and agility of the people building […]
Continuous Security Through Developer Empowerment
Every organization is embracing DevOps to one degree or another. The business impact of shipping software quickly and adapting to market needs is so immense that it has become a requirement—you’re either heading toward DevOps or heading toward bankruptcy. Yet, while our need for speed has increased, so has our need for security—and combining both […]
SRE (Part 2): A Practical Approach
In my last piece on cultural SRE, I covered the basics of defining what SRE means for your team. However, some teams may not need dedicated SRE support. This is where the central organization comes in handy. Dedicated resources are focused on building guidelines, standards, services and platforms for teams to consume that can operate […]
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 […]
Moving from NOC to the SRE Model
Is Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) another case of “Do what Google does”? When viewed with a discerning lens, the practices and tooling high-performing engineering teams deliver to the market can be very beneficial. The SRE model is one of them and stands to benefit DevOps teams substantially. If I could change the name from Site […]
Human Transformation Breeds DevOps Skills and Success
As part of its mission to advance the human elements of DevOps, DevOps Institute has released its 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report. The year-over-year data builds on the inaugural 2019 project but it’s more insightful and more regional than last year. DevOps Institute is grateful to the 1,300 respondents this past year who took […]
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 […]
Predictions 2020: Infrastructure and Ops Trends to Watch in 2020
Today, modernizing systems is more than simply moving technology to a new location. It requires an IT stack of a new generation of technologies and tools to work. As we head into the new year, let’s take a look at the top eight trends that will shape how we will develop and deliver software. Kubernetes […]
Predictions 2020: 7 DevOps Predictions Shaping 2020
2019 was an exciting year for DevOps practitioners, with DevOps adoption continuing to grow at a fast pace. Most organizations were either executing or evaluating their DevOps strategies. So, what is 2020 going to bring in DevOps, infrastructure and application automation? Here are seven DevOps predictions for emerging trends in the new year. Customer Experience […]
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 […]
SREs: The Happiest – and Highest Paid – in the Industry
According to the 2019 StackOverflow survey completed by 90,000 developers around the world, whether you are already a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or thinking about becoming one, looks like you are onto something. SREs, also called DevOps specialists, are a pretty unique type of talent; one that has knowledge in both software development and system […]
SRE: How Do You Get to Blameless?
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is the companion to DevOps. If we take my normal divisions of DEVops versus devOPS, traditional DevOps is mostly the developer side, and SRE is mostly the Ops side. This isn’t a perfect comparison, but it is a good starting point, and for this blog, I’ll run with it. While DevOps […]
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 […]