The current tech winter has a number of glaring stories — cyclical as they may be, there’s one truth that’s been gleaned over more than the rest; the money spent on internal software tools to support tech infrastructure is bloated. And there’s nothing cyclical about this infrastructure spending.
A Recap of SRECon 2023 Americas by guest author Sebastian Vietz.
Last week, over five hundred SREs gathered in Santa Clara to share the latest research, tips, tricks, best practices, and more for site reliability engineering. They were joined by some of the biggest names in the reliability space. And, yes, Gremlin was there to answer any and all questions about chaos engineering and proactive reliability. After three days of great conversations and insightful talk, let’s take a look at some of the themes we heard weaving through SRECon.
Incident Management has evolved considerably over the last couple of decades. Traditionally having been limited to just an on-call team and an alerting system, today it has evolved to include automated Incident Response combined with a complex set of SRE workflows.
Kubernetes can be tough to troubleshoot and remediate fast, especially when you have many interdependent services. This blog, part 3 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, describes the Kubernetes observability foundation StackState has built to support SRE best practices and enable rapid remediation of issues.
Everything you need to know about Mean Time Between Incidents (MTBI) and how it can help Site Reliability Engineers.
Last year, I wrote How We Define SRE Work. This article described how I came up with the charter for the SRE team, which we bootstrapped right around then. It’s been a while. The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager. We are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts of spheres. We are embedded in teams and we handle training, vendor management, capacity planning, cluster updates, tooling, and so on.
Maintaining reliable Kubernetes systems is not easy, especially for people who are not Kubernetes experts. This blog, part 2 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, explains 8 simple best practices SREs can follow to help developers and other SREs build knowledge and effectively troubleshoot issues in applications running on Kubernetes.
Legacy systems often present a challenge when you try to integrate them with modern monitoring tools, especially when they generate log files that contain personally identifiable information (PII) and IP addresses. Thankfully, Grafana Cloud, which is built to work with modern observability tools and data sources, makes it easy to monitor your legacy environments too.
Designing SLOs is a key SRE competency which requires careful consideration and a consistent approach to implementation.
What's the difference between SLAs vs SLOs vs SLIs. Understanding these little nuances are critical for DevOps folks. Here's a simple reckoner on what each of these mean.