Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Google has introduced so many innovations that it’d be impossible to list them all. And we’re not just talking about the obvious things like search engine algorithms or nearly-ubiquitous programs and apps (Google Maps, Docs, Gmail) — not even self-driving cars. Today, we’re going to talk about one such innovation: Site Reliability Engineering. In a nutshell, SRE it’s a practical framework for software development that improves on even giants like DevOps. Wait, what?

Many organizations struggle to create data-driven cultures where each employee is empowered to make decisions based on data. This is especially true for enterprises with a variety of systems and tools in use across different teams. If you are a leader, manager, or executive focused on how your team can leverage Google's SRE practices or wider DevOps practices, definitely you are in the right place!

Reliability and chaos might seem like opposite ideas. But, as Netflix learned in 2010, introducing a bit of chaos—and carefully measuring the results of that chaos—can be a great recipe for reliability. Although most software is created in a tightly controlled environment and carefully tested before release, the production environment is harsher and much less controlled.

Ben Treynor Sloss, then VP of Engineering at Google, coined the term “Site Reliability Engineering” in 2003. Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, aims to build and run scalable and highly available systems. The philosophy behind Site Reliability Engineering is that developers should treat errors as opportunities to learn and improve. SRE teams constantly experiment and try new things to enhance their support systems.

Mature start-ups and scale-ups create wonderful and challenging environments for Engineers. As the product they’re creating matures and the brand becomes a successful one, the user base generally starts growing, and, for some companies, in places they might not expect it to grow. As that happens, new challenges arise for Engineers. One of these challenges is pretty straightforward to guess. Basically having a particular product available throughout different regions of the world.

Ask most SREs how many incidents they’d have to respond to in a perfect world, and their answer would probably be “zero.” After all, making software and infrastructure so reliable that incidents never occur is the dream that SREs are theoretically chasing. Reducing actual incidents by as much as possible is a noble goal. However, it’s important to recognize that incidents aren’t an SRE’s number one enemy.

SRE requires teamwork and planning. Be like Aiven, get it right.

Digital business is an imperative for 21st-century companies. Increasingly, organizations are directing investments toward technologies that deliver outcomes fast and enable more resilient digital business models. In this landscape, incidents such as software bugs, power outages, or downed networks have major consequences that affect both revenue and customer loyalty.

Site reliability engineering continues to gain traction in software development and IT. SRE is at the crossroads of software development and IT operations. In Ben Treynor’s words, SRE is “what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function.” Site reliability engineering is a way for developers to actively build services and functions to improve the resilience of people, processes and technical systems.