How SRE transform ItOps?

December 29, 2021

Traditional IT Ops does not work at the same speed that the industry expects for cloud-native software delivery. This is why new approaches came into existence, specifically Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) that helps gain traction across the industry.

SRE, pioneered by Google, is completely different from IT operations. This is because it focuses on the error budget, code, inter-team relationships brokered by the error budget, and SRE teams’ ability to push back lousy software.

In this blog, we will understand the advantages of SRE and its impact on IT operations for both leaders and managers.

1. Let software engineers design IT Ops

People working on SRE teams are IT operation people with development knowledge or software engineers with strong operations knowledge.

SREs write software to automate the task when they need to perform manual steps to restore service to an application more than a few times. And because SREs understand and apply modern software development techniques, the software they write to fix the problem will not just be a clunky shell script but well-written software with test frameworks that run in a continuous integration environment.

This software-first approach to IT occasionally advances to the development team’s role. If the SRE team that takes care of a particular application or service finds that it spends more than 50% of its time doing manual operational work to fix problems in the software, the development team must take over.

2 Rigorous focuses on error budget and SLOs.

The major perspective of adopting the SRE approach is the SLO for the application or service operated by the SRE team. The product manager for the service must choose an appropriate SLO that gives them enough margin for potential downtime to cover unforeseen issues while delivering features and updates at a pace that users expect.

Along with that, the SLO approach drives the adoption of synthetic transaction monitoring. It is an excellent practice for the systems which directly face customers. It identifies customer journeys regularly by using an automated script. As a result, it brings the service to the customer, and the dev & SRE teams come closer to customers.

3. Let SRE kick off cloud-native IT Ops.

For an organization planning to move to the cloud, the range of options for automation can be a bit difficult. There are various methods available for DevOps implementation, which can be confusing. In turn, that will make a huge difference to the efficiency of these methods.

The SRE model offers clear and specific strategies and dynamics that help organizations on a larger scale. If you are working in an organization that needs to immediately access cloud-based platforms from on-premise, then SRE is something that they should adopt. But the key point is that they need to do it properly, not just renaming existing teams.

By adopting SRE models, you may bypass other organizational processes of delivery models. But you need to beware of pending implementation that doesn’t require set-up to balance responsibilities.

4. Use managed services to quickly implement SRE.

One way to get the SRE benefits properly is hiring an external source for managing SRE instead of hiring lots of unskilled employees to handle it. Although SRE at Google was developed and codified with the help of internal teams, we are starting to see some emerging SRE-as-a-service offerings from capable outsourced managed service providers.

For organizations that are familiar with the collaborative, in-house DevOps approach for building and running software systems, SRE-as-a-service might be strange. If we consider SRE’s amazing aspects, such as delicate dynamics, then it will work magically.

The SLO and well-defined standard operating procedures lend in a commercial contract to get the best out of the SRE approach.

Conclusion

SRE is an approach to IT operations at a larger scale. The SRE model helps to enhance the productivity of the development and SRE teams with the help of SLOs and error budgets. This further help in balancing the speed of new features with the tasks that need to be done to ensure software reliability.

SRE needs special skills to manage, which includes understanding between the teams. Using an SRE-as-a-service offering from a skilled outsource provider can help you get the most out of it.

You can talk to an expert at iSmile Technologies for free for further discussion!