Top Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Trends in 2023

January 2, 2023

As organizations embrace hybrid cloud strategies and IT automation at scale, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) continues to gain popularity. Organizations apply software engineering principles to operations and infra practices, and by doing so, SRE enables enterprises to streamline IT processes. In a recent survey, 88% of the site reliability engineers (SREs) said now there is greater recognition that their role has strategic importance in the business success than it was there some years ago. In recent years, SRE has become an essential discipline in enterprises that use DevOps (the combination of development and operations) and agile methods. Though the SRE adoption is growing, a lot remains to be done. To unleash innovation, businesses will have to evolve their SRE approaches. This post will uncover some site reliability engineering trends that will help organizations get the maximum out of their DevOps practices.

1. MTTR is a top priority

The SRE improves the reliability of production systems. And these days, reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) is a top priority. But According to research, 60% of the SREs spend most time building and maintaining automation code. Increasing automation is essential, but organizations will lose their efficiency if enablement is difficult & time-consuming. Major problems stem from how SRE teams build automation for DevOps workflows. Teams usually do this case-by-case as their tooling doesn’t have automation built-in and doesn’t offer ‘everything-as-code’ capabilities. Therefore, they must build an automation layer on top of their tooling.

With time, it creates a complex code structure that is difficult to scale along the DevOps pipeline. If SRE teams don’t discover an efficient approach to DevOps from the beginning, they will see more of their time wasted in the future. That causes developers to chase down bugs and other code issues rather than focus on strategic, revenue-generating work. This underlines the importance of SREs working with DevOps teams, developers, and architects to ensure that software satisfies a business need and is resilient and automatable by default. Letting teams integrate new automation abilities with existing tools and workflows minimizes manual effort and boosts engineering practices.

2. The focus is shifting to SRE-driven engineering

Around 50% of SREs have said they dedicate time entirely to influencing architectural design decisions to boost reliability. This hints that nearly all departments have some progress towards SRE-driven engineering to increase reliability, resiliency, and security. But we still have a long way to go. Experienced enterprises embrace SRE practices that involve pretty experienced developers. They know how to build a system that can scale from 100 users to 2,000 or from 2 million to 20 million. Associating these developers with the design process gives architects insight to include reliability from the beginning.

3. Security

SREs are also moving ahead with extending organization-wide DevSecOps approaches. This ensures that organizations can restore systems rapidly after discovering a fault. More than two-thirds (nearly 70%) of SREs think that their role in security will become even more central in the coming future. This trend will increase if organizations use third-party libraries for cloud-native app development. There is no doubt that third-party code libraries face significant security risks. SRE teams are seriously looking to identify the flaws and eliminate them for fail-proof IT protection and to reduce the cloud & third-party risks.

4. SREs must experiment

It has been found that nearly half (51%) of SREs give a significant amount of time in designing experiments and tests to minimize the risk of production failure. Still, even after that, only 1 in 10 take it as their top priority. Experimentation is essential in SRE. Teams still need to ensure they have more time for these tasks. If SREs want to deliver more strategic business value, engineers must arrange for streamlining tasks that involve rigorous manual effort.

How ISmile Technologies Help:

Automation: ISmile Technologies provides automated tools and solutions that help site reliability engineers automate repetitive tasks, which reduces the risk of human error and increases efficiency.
Monitoring: ISmile Technologies also provides monitoring solutions that help site reliability engineers detect and respond to potential issues before we become critical problems. This helps to ensure that the site is always available and performing at optimal levels.
Incident management: With ISmile Technologies, site reliability engineers can easily manage incidents by tracking and prioritizing issues, coordinating with other teams, and resolving issues quickly and efficiently.
Testing and Deployment: ISmile Technologies helps site reliability engineers to test and deploy new code in a safe and efficient way, reducing the risk of downtime and other issues.
Collaboration: Finally, ISmile Technologies provides collaboration tools that help site reliability engineers work closely with other teams, such as developers, operations, and support, to ensure that the site is running smoothly.

ISmile Technologies provides a wide range of tools and solutions that help site reliability engineers manage their sites more effectively. From automation and monitoring to incident management and collaboration, ISmile Technologies provides the resources that site reliability engineers need to ensure that their sites are always available, reliable, and performing at their best.

All the SRE trends mentioned in this post can help your organization advance in its practices. By embracing experimentation, one can unleash exciting innovation. ISmile Technologies’ SRE services ensure high reliability, uptime, and availability. We incorporate the RED (Request rate, error rate, duration) and USE (Utilisation, Saturation, Error rate) methods in our SRE implementation to minimize the gap between service delivery and user experience. Our SRE team has expertise & experience which ranges from coding to automation, and from monitoring to documentation. Schedule a free assessment today.