To embed or not to embed: That is the question. At least, that’s one of the questions that companies have to answer as they decide how to implement Site Reliability Engineering. They can either embed SREs into existing teams, or they can build a new, separate SRE team. Both approaches have their pros and cons. The right strategy for your company or team depends, of course, on your needs and priorities.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams and Platform Engineering teams share similar goals -- like maximizing automation and reducing toil -- and similar methodologies. But they have different priorities, and use somewhat different tools to achieve them. What are SREs, what are platform engineers and how is each role similar and different? This article explains.
If you’re an SRE, you might view AIOps with great excitement. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. Alternatively, SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain. They might think of AIOps as just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t live up to its promises, and that can become a distraction from the SRE tools that really matter. Which perspective is right?
When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you? That’s a question that engineers rarely step back to consider. The rational, disciplined parts of our minds tell us that the playbooks we are supposed to follow were carefully designed and tested, and that we should stick to them at all costs.
When you think of who uses feature flags, your mind most likely goes to developers. In general, feature flags are closely associated with software engineering. But Site Reliability Engineers, too, can benefit from feature flags. SREs may not be the ones to create feature flags, but they should work closely with developers to ensure that the applications their teams support include feature flags.
A list of the top nine SRE skills, from incident management, to cloud computing, to networking and beyond.
From alerting to during to post incident, great communication is the key to effective incident response.
An analysis of SRE job descriptions from 4 companies highlights what businesses actually expect SREs to do.
Many of the concepts SREs take for granted about incident management originated with efforts to fight fires in California in the 1970s.
An overview of major IT incidents and outages in 2021
