Site Reliability Engineering Best Practices

June 18, 2021

There always existed barriers between development and operations team during software development. Over the years, several concepts and measures have been adopted by companies to break down those barriers in order run the operations smoothly. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is one such structured approach where both teams work in unison as one unit to create and cultivate software application that are reliable and ascendable.

The conception of SRE originated at Google and later on adopted by several other companies like Netflix and Amazon. Embracing new concept has never been easy, there are several factors that can contribute to the process or create hindrance. Promptness, enactment, capacity forecasting, security, hardware and software updates, and accessibility are underlying drivers of SRE. Here are the top Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices that ensure flawless system consistency. Let’s check them out.

Scrutinizing Errors and accessibility

To detect performance issues and maintain service accessibility, SRE teams need to watch out every aspect of the system. Keeping an eye on the system is required to verify whether it is working in expected manner or not. The team needs to analyse the upgrade made in the system closely and understand it’s impact on the customers. This helps in detection of gaps in timely manner and refrain from losses at early stage.

Keeping an error budget

When creating a software or application, teams are given budget for a particular period. If things do not work smoothly and they run out of budget even before they know then upgrades or development is stalled until new budget is passed. However, under SRE error budget is maintained to avoid such predicament. This helps out in smooth functioning and attainment of goals without hindrance.

Defining Service Level Objectives

Analysing the accessibility and performance of the application/software like an end user is necessary which is defined by measuring service level objectives under SRE. Service level objectives are values that define how good your service is.

Dextrous planning capability

SRE always prepare for unforeseen and upcoming events. Planning ahead is always necessary, which can be done by testing the efficiency of the application or software time to time. There are events when application/software may have to take load more than it usually take. If it is not prepared in advance for such situation, then in it may result in sudden failure and customer disappointment.

Monitoring management changes

Outages in systems are caused by even slight changes. Analysing upgrade, it’s impacts and risks beforehand is really necessary to avoid downfall out of the system. Considering the bigger picture, monitoring the system and diagnosing errors and their elimination is one of the best SRE practice.

Eliminating Toil

Toil is total waste of engineering time and practicing automation allows its elimination. SRE creates frameworks and automated process that reduces workload of the team. This also allows the team to focus more innovation rather than on invention.

Ethical Postmortem

To build a reliable system it is required to focus on process and technology and not on people when things go wrong. Find the root cause of the issue and do not pin on people involved in it. Failures are unintentional and learning from them is important. Blaming individuals or groups may restrict people from taking risks and limit their innovative thinking.

To build a strong SRE team organization need to follow its best practices. Train your team, have faith in the process and you will achieve your goals in no time. Following SRE creates a healthy organizational environment which is the key to success.

Ismile Technologies runs 24*7 SRE team and have following teams today, new teams can be extended as needed