I am writing this blog post after taking a course from Google Cloud Boost Skills. It was fascinating to learn about the significance of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and DevOps in organizations of any size.

Happy Lak is in Richmond Park, watching the deer.
Happy Lak is in Richmond Park, watching the deer.

Before diving into the importance of SRE and DevOps, let’s understand what DevOps is.

Traditionally, developers and operators (the team that deploys and manages systems/applications) functioned in silos, leading to numerous challenges. This separation resulted in increased technical debt, longer time-to-market for solutions, and poor communication and collaboration between teams. Thanks to DevOps practices, teams are now structured in a more integrated manner to address both development and operational needs. This integrated approach reduces time-to-market with calculated risks, introducing terms such as SLA and SLI into the mix.

SLA (Service Level Agreement): A commitment between a service provider and a client regarding the expected level of service

SLI (Service Level Indicator): A measure of the service level provided to the client

A herd of deer is grazing in the park.
A herd of deer is grazing in the park.

Connecting five key touchpoints highlights the thin line between SRE and DevOps. Essentially, Class SRE implements DevOps for several reasons:

1. Reduce Organizational Silos: Siloed working environments attract numerous engineering problems. By reducing silos, organizations can bring ideas to life more optimally.

2. Accept Failure as Normal: Making mistakes is human, but learning from them is crucial. A blameless culture that performs postmortems of problems enhances the learning curve and encourages teams to take ownership.

3. Implement Gradual Change: Change is essential for growth. The technology landscape is embedded with change management at its core. Software engineering teams live by agile values, are open to changes, and consider rapid development and deployment crucial. Understanding consumer requirements, listening to feedback, and analyzing user data are vital for mutual success. Canary and blue-green deployments exemplify this approach.

4. Leverage Tools and Automation: Introducing automation empowers software engineering teams. This can range from simple tools for capturing screenshots to advanced AI companions for auto-coding. Integrating such systems into workflows boosts company productivity.

5. Measure Everything: While empowering software engineering is crucial, defining success criteria and measuring them is even more critical for business success. Defining KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) enables teams and individuals to enhance their work methods.

Stay tuned for the next post where we will dive deeper into SLA, SLI, and similar terms.

Reference:

Site Reliability Engineering: Measuring and Managing Reliability | Google Cloud Skills Boost