In the software industry’s recent past, the biggest disruptive wave was Agile methodologies. While Site Reliability Engineering is still early in its adoption, those of us who experienced the disruptive transformation of Agile see the writing on the wall: SRE will impact everyone. Any kind of major transformation like this requires a change in culture, which is a catch-all term for changing people’s principles and behaviors.

What a difference a year makes. In a matter of 365 days, the entire planet stared down at uncertainty, and while most of the world is far from recovered, we are starting to see a time where some level of normalcy will return. But what will this look like? How will the past year transform our social interactions, our time out of the house, and how we conduct business?

In the beginning, there were flight controllers. These were a strange breed. In the early days of the US Manned Space Program, most american households, regardless of class or race, knew the names of the astronauts. John Glen, Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong. The manned space program was a unifying force of national pride. But no-one knew the names of the anonymous men and later, women, who got the astronauts to orbit, to the moon, and most importantly, got them back to earth.

People sometimes think that implementing Site Reliability Engineering (or DevOps for that matter) will magically make everything better. Just sprinkle a little bit of SRE fairy dust on your organization and your services will be more reliable, more profitable, and your IT, product and engineering teams will be happy. It’s easy to see why people think this way. Some of the world’s most reliable and scalable services run with the help of an SRE team, Google being the prime example.

Is love in the air? We think so. While we don’t have chocolate or flowers for you, we have something just as sweet. Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this February.

Incidents that disrupt services are unavoidable. But every breakdown is an opportunity to learn & improve. Our latest blog is a deep dive into best practices to follow across the lifecycle of an incident, helping teams build a sustainable and reliable product - the SRE way As the saying goes, “Every problem we face is a blessing in disguise”.

When implementing SRE, almost every role within your IT organization will change. One of the biggest transformations will be in your Quality Assurance teams. A common misconception is that SRE “replaces” QA. People believe SLOs and other SRE best practices render the traditional role of QA engineering obsolete, as testing and quality shift left in the SDLC. This leads to QA teams resisting SRE adoption.

We live in the era of reliability. The most important feature for a service is how dependable it is in the eyes of a user. Companies are hiring with this in mind. In a 2019 LinkedIn article, site reliability engineers were listed as the 2nd most promising career in the United States. But how do you get started as an SRE? In this blog post, we’ll look at: SRE is a multifaceted role. You will contribute to an organization's code base, policy, culture, and more.

When we think of reliability tools, we may overlook the humble checklist. While tools like SLOs represent the cutting edge of SRE, checklists have been recommended in many industries such as surgery and aviation for almost a century. But checklists owe this long and widespread adoption to their usefulness. Checklists can also help limit errors when deploying code to production. In this blog post, we’ll cover: Production checklists should be holistic.

The most essential lesson of SRE is that failure is inevitable. This shouldn’t be a cause for despair. SRE shows how embracing failure is empowering. By celebrating failure, you can accelerate development and foster a culture of learning. Rather than hoping to prevent failure, SRE prepares you to respond well to it. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate where failure will occur in complex systems given unknown unknowns.