Site Reliability Engineering incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them directly to infrastructure and operations problems. The core goals are simple to state and hard to deliver consistently: build scalable, highly reliable software systems, and keep them that way as usage grows.
Principles for Effective Protection
- Automation: Reduce manual effort with automation of recurring tasks to improve productivity.
- Reliability: Systems must be reliable and available with minimal downtime.
- Scalability: Build systems that can scale gracefully with increasing demand.
- Supervision: Good monitoring that can spot problems and fix them quickly.
- Incident Management: Manage incidents effectively to minimise service disruption.
Core Practices
- Service Level Objectives (SLOs): Establish and monitor the desired level of service performance and availability for all services.
- Error Budgets: Striking the right balance between innovation and reliability with acceptable levels of failure.
- Blameless Postmortems: Learning from incidents, not blaming.
Advantages
→ More reliability and resilience to failures
→ Automation reduces manual work and increases efficiency
→ Proactive monitoring to allow faster incident response
→ Scalability as you grow without major rework
Our SRE case study with a global e-commerce customer shows the dramatic effect of proactive monitoring and consistent performance reporting on downtime and customer satisfaction versus reactive crisis management. TriOpz’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice provides clients with the same proactive approach, without the need to build an SRE team from the ground up.