By Vinita Jacob, Associate Director, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Verizon Consumer Group
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an important approach for organisations looking to optimise the performance of their systems and applications to deliver reliable, scalable, and secure solutions to users. It is a software engineering approach to IT operations. SRE teams use software as a tool to manage systems, solve problems, and automate operations tasks. As more and more organisations embrace hybrid cloud strategies and IT automation at scale, SRE continues to gain momentum. In recent years, SRE has become an essential discipline in organisations that use DevOps and Agile methodologies.
Moving towards an SRE model involves several critical stages and evaluations that could vary for each organisation. But the most crucial component of the journey is to rally the organisation towards embracing a ‘reliability’ mindset. This involves a fundamental shift in perspective towards operations and infrastructure, by approaching them as software engineering challenges and dismantling organisational silos with a shared ownership model. SRE teams can greatly enhance the dependability, effectiveness, and security of their systems by placing a strong emphasis on reliability, employing data-driven decision making and nurturing a culture that prioritises continuous improvement.
The cultural tenets of ‘Reliability’ engineering
-Accepting failure as part of the learning process
-Adopting a blameless culture. Cultivate an environment that is devoid of blame but filled with trust, transparency, growth, and accountability
-Building a strong team and shared ownership
-Putting resiliency first. It doesn’t matter how feature-rich or innovative your service is if users can’t reliably access it.
-Promoting a culture of continuous improvement
-Embracing automation. Identify Toil and build in as much automation as possible, to make operations tasks run in an almost auto-pilot mode.
-Let data do the talking. Be deliberate about the metrics you track to identify customer needs.
