Site Reliability Engineering

Introduction:

As Organizations witness an increase and transformation in Information technology, A lot of organizations are shifting towards cloud-based computing and have to fulfil the demands of an increase in digital services.

To get ahold of this process and transformation, Site Reliability Engineering or simply SRE steps in. The fundamental base for SRE is when one starts treating digital operations similar to software problems.

But what even is SRE? Why is it in demand? What are its benefits? Well, stay tuned and read ahead to find out!

What is SRE?

To ensure organizations meet SLAs laid down with menial discrepancies, SRE enabling is necessary. Site Reliability Engineering ensures that businesses can fulfil SLAs for various fields like business KPIs, Performances, Compliance, etc.

This is done by automating several IT operations like incident management, change management, system management, critical actions, emergency protocols, risk controls, etc. with the help of intelligent software engineering. This ensures a constantly programmed automation for these operations as well as cuts the dependency on Human labour and minimises manual errors known as System administrators or sysadmins

What are the Principles of SRE

The basic principle of SRE is utilising software codes to automate otherwise manually executed operations. This results in efficiency with energy conservation and sustainability of the operations, especially when dealing with cloud control or migration. It additionally reduces friction between development teams (Dev Teams) that constantly release new or updated software versions and teams that are keen on the update’s reliability with no threats to the system or data (Operations or Ops teams).

Additionally, there is a standard set of five to seven principles of SRE. They are:

• Embracing Risk
• Service Level Objectives
• Eliminating obstacles
• Distributed System Monitoring
• Automation
• Release Engineering
• Simplicity in execution and function

As a result, SREs greatly ensure enhanced risk and disaster management regardless of the size of the threat. Whether the business is small or corporate level, it becomes necessary to protect essential business resources and processes by maintaining the level of cleanliness and disciple at the IT and digital levels.

Who are SRE engineers and why are they so important?

SRE engineers are software engineers with knowledge of IT operations whose primary role is to monitor and perform functions and sysadmin tasks like performance tuning, postmortems, production environment testing, analysing logs and databases, incident management and developing software and codes for automating these processes with a main aim of causing migration from manual to automation gradually relying heavily on the latter.

These engineers act as a bridge between the Dev and Ops teams mentioned above and allow the release of new software or updates with minimal conflicts and compliance with the SLAs laid down by the organisation and its customers. 

SRE engineers help the DevOps team establish benevolent levels of SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), Error Budgets, Stakeholder Documentation, etc.

Benefits of SRE

Given the principles of SRE, it becomes easy to decipher the multitude of benefits that follow closely when one enables SRE in their business and Information Technology Operations. The common benefits recorded by Organization’s are:

• Helps teams to orient themselves with Customer Satisfaction, thus delivering exceptional results.
• Improves incident management and reduces hassles between customers and businesses.
• Transformation units through cultural, technical and practical modifications.
• Increases Visibility into service and digital health and constantly keeps a check on them.
• Increased Automation with a reduction in manual errors.
• Provocative Troubleshooting
• Accurate reporting of data metrics and changes
• Elimination of bugs in the primary stages
• Enhance overall business output and customer experience

Due to these reasons and with how efficient SRE is, several organisations are choosing to include SRE and have greatly benefited from it.

In a nutshell, SRE teams and SRE improve a business’s digital security, execution, operations, customer relations and experience and reduce negative business impacts during events of outages or shutdowns. If you’re still confused about integrating SRE into your business, this is a sign that you must proceed to ensure your business has a bright, exponential and secure future in the world of digital services and operations.