Site Reliability Engineering: Why it's Crucial for any Organization?

Quick Overview: As a leading provider of software engineering services, you’d want to ensure that software engineering is an error-free IT process, right? Well, Site Reliability Engineering can help you with it. Wondering what it is and how it can help your business? Well, this blog will explain why SRE plays a vital role in your organization.

As a business owner, you’ll want your websites and web applications to be always available, reliable, and performant, right? Well, one and only thing that can help you to stay ahead with it is SRE!

With the help of site reliability engineering solutions, you can not only optimize the performance but also eliminate errors and minimize downtime. In today's era of digitalization, where users expect instant access to information, SRE has become more crucial than ever.

Businesses tend to risk losing potential customers, revenue, and their reputation in total without an SRE. So, if you are a startup or a large enterprise, SRE must be vital for your organization. Without delay, let us dive into what it is and understand its importance, and understand how software engineering solutions help with it.

What is Site Reliability Engineering?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), is a term that comes from Google. Site Reliability Engineer builds a bridge between IT operations and development teams by streamlining complex tasks previously performed by processes. Generally, these engineers use various automation tools to eliminate issues by crafting reliable and scalable software systems.

An SRE engineer is primarily responsible for DevOps automation and standardization, especially when systems migrate to the cloud. Thus, they have significant hands-on experience in software engineering services or system administration with IT operations. The site reliability engineering concept was coined by Ben Treynor Sloss from the Google engineering team. It is referred to as “when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem.”

The primary goal of SRE is to develop software systems and automate solutions for various operations. As a result, SRE conducts the work that operations would normally do, but with the added benefit of hiring dedicated developers to tackle complicated challenges.

SRE extended its universe and became a full-fledged IT domain to develop automated solutions for operational areas, like performance and capacity planning, disaster response, and on-call monitoring. It implements other key DevOps concepts, such as infrastructure as a code and continuous delivery.

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History of SRE at Google

Now, let’s understand how SRE is implemented at Google with detailed information.

When talking about Google SRE or Google site reliability engineering, it’s a set of workflows, practices, and policies to assess efficiency, improve services, and set service reliability goals. Doesn’t it sound like a good plan?

The necessity for SRE came from Google's requirement to update its various products and services regularly while maintaining their continuous availability. Developers wanted to deploy upgrades to production as soon as possible, while Ops engineers wanted as few problems as feasible. This led to a conflict, resulting in endless discussions and attempts to circumvent the systems.

This was when Ben Traynor came up with a series of steps that later formed the basis of the SRE methodology.

How Does Site Reliability Engineering Work?

SRE integrates the participation of site reliability engineers in a software team. The SRE team creates an errors budget and establishes the essential metrics for the SRE after considering the system's tolerance level. The development team may readily release new features if the number of errors is low. On the other hand, the team will automatically halt updates and address any existing issues if errors frequently exceed the authorized error budget.

If there are any problems or difficulties with the application, the SRE team merely makes a thorough report to the software engineering team. For instance: SRE engineers use services to analyze performance data and detect anomalous application behavior. The developer's primary responsibility is to address the reported issue and release the corrected application.

What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do?

The role and responsibility of Site Reliability Engineering are to keep the organization focused on what matters most to customers, ensuring the platforms and services they are dependent on are accessible when they need them.

This is the opposite of DevOps development, which is more of a mindset of breaking down silos and sharing responsibility for a faster deployment cadence with various implementation techniques. With that being said, let us pay close attention to the role of a site reliability engineer.

SRE Skills and Responsibilities

1. A site reliability engineer typically has a software development background and some operations and business analytics knowledge. These things become required to address operational challenges with the help of code. While DevOps culture focuses on automating IT processes, SRE teams focus more on planning and design.
2. They keep track of production systems and analyze their performance to identify areas for improvement. Their observations also help calculate the probable cost of disruptions and develop contingency plans.
3. They bifurcate their time between on-call and operational tasks and design systems to improve site reliability and performance. Therefore, according to Google, SREs should not spend more than 50% of their time on operations, and any breach of this criterion indicates system ill-health.
4. A site reliability engineer devotes a lot of time to creating and delivering solutions that improve the effectiveness of IT and support departments. This might also be used to create a new product from scratch to address issues with incident management or current software delivery.
5. An SRE engineer oversees the creation and implementation of services proactively. SRE handles everything, including modifications, monitoring, alerting, and code changes in the production environment.
6. SRE helps in resolving problems with support escalation. However, as operations progress, the system usually becomes more dependable, and there are fewer significant incidents in production, which means that support escalations are rare.
7. SRE assists in streamlining on-call procedures and rotations. The position gives the teams a lot of input into improving system reliability by optimizing on-call processes. Simply put, the SRE team will do their best to add automation and context to alerts, enhancing the on-call responders' ability to work together in real time.

Note: SREs use service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level indicators (SLI), and service-level objectives (SLO) to determine what new features can be adopted and when they can be delivered to ensure that there are fewer incidents.

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What Makes a Great SRE?

Now that you have an in-depth insight into SRE, its roles, and responsibilities, let us walk you through attributes that make a great SRE.

1. Problem Solving

Analyzing that there is a problem is the first step in solving any problem. Simply expressed, SRE's primary duty is to assist in resolving issues that impede value delivery. SRE should be open to giving recommendations outside their official zone of influence and be curious about how things are done or what people are doing.

A terrific SRE is an excellent problem solver with strong communication abilities and the capacity to think creatively.

2. Awareness Building

Assisting in accelerating the flow and reliability through change management is one of the main issues encountered by SRE. A budget error that highlights the discrepancy between service reliability and agreed-upon service-lead goals (SLOs) is given to the SRE team.

The team is expected to manage its own workload, but there are clear policies and repercussions that set forth what happens if the error budget is used up if the service levels are not met. Since the error budget is intended to be used, the team can easily make independent decisions to improve flow.

Analyzing how to use the decision-making process to create awareness of outcomes and then distributing the feedback loop throughout the organization is a component of SRE.

3. Collaboration

With the help of operational procedures, the IT teams will have to administer the services. Just as IT operations staff members must learn how to code, the developers will need to become knowledgeable about it. A great SRE will include feedback from a variety of sources to produce the greatest results.

4. Empathy

What SRE most needs is a code of conduct based on psychologically safe surroundings to function effectively. The blame culture has no place, especially if the organization needs to be flexible enough to satisfy system demands.

Importance of SRE

Site reliability engineers interact with product owners, alternative engineers, and consumers to return measures and targets. Once you've set a system's timeframe and accessibility, you'll know when action is required.

Some significant components of SRE to consider are listed below:

• Service-Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLO), and Observability are frequently used to accomplish this task.
• Because of the connections between systems, an engineer should understand them comprehensively.
• Site reliability engineers are responsible for ensuring the early detection of problems in order to reduce the cost of failure.
• Since Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) strives to resolve conflicts between groups, each SRE and development team is expected to understand the front end, back end, libraries, storage, and alternative parts. And because the parts are shared, no one from the team can enviously own a single portion.

Best Practices for Enhanced Site Reliability Engineering

Well, when it comes to adopting SRE, it can be a difficult task. The same is the case since it necessitates a fundamental transformation in the way that software and applications are created and made available to their users. Therefore, developing your SRE best practices and customizing them to meet your operational needs may take some time. Once more, if you follow a few practices for improved site reliability, your procedure will go more quickly.

1. Understand the Changes Holistically

SRE assists in promoting a comprehensive method of examining the issues and potential solutions. The team will be able to better understand the reason for the change and its effects by analyzing and evaluating all the instances.

The strategy assists the team in understanding any dependencies that bring about change in the greatest feasible way. Additionally, the teams' evaluation of both immediate and long-term effects is aided by the comprehensive analysis of change.

2. Expand Skill Set

SRE will only increase the need for highly qualified engineers and architects with a variety of skills. Since the environment and mode of operation for the product were once dynamic, engineers who are continually honing their skill set and experience are needed to satisfy the demands.

Therefore, you can quickly turn your conventional workforce into an accomplished SRE team by promoting various training and professional development programs and courses.

3. Eliminate Manual Tasks

Making every effort to reduce redundancy is one of the greatest site reliability engineering practices. SRE, however, actively promotes automation from the start, starting from the perspective that supports future automation.

4. Learn from Mistakes

The site reliability engineers are concerned with ongoing development. This element compels the teams to view the postmortems as the best possible teaching tool. SRE offers insight that enables the teams to communicate the incidents rather than getting sucked into the blame game. By doing this, they will be able to recognize the problems objectively as well as the areas that require knowledge or skill to be improved.

5. Define Service-Level Objectives Like an End-User

It's crucial to assess and take consumers' needs into account while developing software services to guarantee high dependability and availability. As a result of clearly defining the service-level objective, you can gain a better understanding of the end user's perspective and optimize your systems or applications for better services, hence ensuring a greater uptime.

SRE vs DevOps

You might have thought that SRE is like DevOps. But NO. You are wrong!

DevOps is one type of methodology that automates the software project delivery process to reduce the risk of human errors and deliver seamless services and products. It’s a collaborative approach that creates a bridge between developers and operations teams. As a result, it will help you with various benefits like reduced development time, fewer bugs, automated upgrades and rollbacks, and more. Plus, to make the most of DevOps, you can rely on the leading DevOps services for the same.

Let’s go through some of the highlights representing the comparison between SRE and DevOps.

• While talking about SRE vs DevOps, SRE is focused on ironing out inconsistencies in the workflows to ensure service reliability, whereas DevOps focuses on automating repetitive operations to reduce the routine and maximize performance.

• The core difference between DevOps vs SRE, SRE focuses on development problems; on the other hand, whereas DevOps focuses on operational issues.

• While talking about SRE vs DevOps, SRE aims to enhance the system's reliability and availability, whereas DevOps focuses on development and deployment speed with continuous delivery.

• In DevOps vs SRE, DevOps is a methodology that enables the mindset of culture and collaboration between siloed teams, whereas SRE was developed to create a set of practices for better collaboration and service delivery.

SRE Principles

SRE adheres to some principles for its operations as it holds a collaborative approach between operations and development.

Let’s have a look below:

• To automate infrastructure scalability, create DevOps CI/CD solution workflows.
• Cap the Ops load: SRE only accounts for half of the toil. At least half of the budget must be spent on upgrading the system rather than putting out flames.
• The development team should handle at least 5% of the Ops workload. If the load increases due to the faults of developers, they will deal with any excessive chores.
• Measure system performance against a Service Level Agreement (SLA), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for your services.
• Establish an error budget to manage the rate at which changes are pushed into production while maintaining quality.
• Observe latency, saturation, traffic, and faults with in-depth monitoring.
• Create response scenarios for dealing with situations that are based on symptom-based notifications. To keep the team's abilities sharp, create automated runbooks for each scenario and test them on a regular basis.
• Conduct blameless postmortems and repair any flaws that are discovered.
• SRE and engineering teams should share a recruitment pool. Allow SREs to progress to the level of developers.

Benefits of SRE

If you hire DevOps engineers, they will help you produce software faster and collaboratively. However, this will not guarantee to increase in site performance and reliability; that’s where the role of SRE comes into the picture.

But how can your organization benefit from site reliability engineering?

Let’s go through the major advantages of hiring an SRE team.

1. Cultural Improvement

The system's health and vulnerabilities are constantly monitored due to site reliability engineering. It allows you to continuously look for the best solutions that benefit teams, departments, and services while encouraging collaboration at the same time. This shared sense of accountability benefits both the business culture and the product.

2. Boosted Automation

A site reliability engineer will always prefer the most efficient and effective way to modernize legacy systems and automate product engineering operations. However, they are adopting the latest tools and alert systems to improve their own workflow for finding system vulnerabilities. This eliminates the time it takes to locate, highlight, and fix errors. As a result of the automation, the system grows more reliable with time.

3. Proactive Troubleshooting

To stay ahead of the competitive curve, many organizations rely on innovation and the implementation of new features. However, fast development and delivery mean there could be a chance of having a huge room for flaws and vulnerabilities. SRE can detect and resolve issues before they reach the end-users as they work proactively. This will result in saving time, effort, and money.

4. Better Customer Experience

The primary goal of SREs is to improve customer experience, whereas DevOps is more concerned with internal operations. A site reliability engineer sets clear targets for satisfying customer expectations by employing metrics like SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. This will result in more dependable products and considerable ROI gains.

5. Accurate Metrics Reporting

By monitoring and measuring productivity, service health, and bug occurrence, SREs bring additional clarity. They can translate analytics into tangible elements (such as average downtime) and their relationship to lost revenue for the company. It's easier to target areas of improvement with relevant solutions after they've been identified.

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Roles and Responsibilities of an SRE

Site reliability engineers are some of the most important players in the organization. They should be able to understand the software and technologies easily. Moreover, they should have a technical background, and any other additional experience in system administration would be helpful.

However, there are some roles and responsibilities they will be able to fulfill throughout the development process, which are as follows:

1. Automation

As previously said, SRE engineers provide automation solutions to manage IT processes. As a result, they aim to automate these tasks rather than conducting them manually.

These are some of the functions:

• CI/CD
• Monitoring
• Incident response
• Alerts

2. Monitoring

SRE engineers ensure that the underlying infrastructure is operating smoothly, and that systems and tools are functioning properly. They also keep an eye on essential apps and services to ensure their availability and reduce downtime.

3. Problem Solver

These engineers communicate closely with developers at the time of difficulties, so they can assist with troubleshooting and provide advice when alerts are issued.

If a developer encounters a problem, this engineer will investigate and then resolve the problem.

Following the resolution of the incident, the engineer will revisit the problem and establish the root cause to ensure that it does not occur again.

4. Collaboration Between Teams

SREs collaborate with various teams, mostly operations and development. By creating dependable systems and assisting these teams, they will have more time to focus on developing new features. Hence, they will deliver them faster to customers.

Required Skills to Become Site Reliability Engineers

Nowadays, SRE engineers are in great demand. Hence, it’s advisable to look for technical expertise and specific skill sets when you hire them.

Here are some required skills you need to consider while hiring them,

• Understanding of DevOps Architecture and concepts
• CI/CD implementation expertise
• Coding skills
• Knowledge of databases
• Knowledge of using Version Control and monitoring tools
• Using cloud-native applications
• Problem-solving skills
• Management and leadership skills

The Future of Site Reliability Engineering

The future of site reliability engineering is promising. In the coming years, as automation becomes more popular, SRE will become even more important and productive, helping software teams to stay ahead of the competition.

The SRE team will be responsible for handling incidents from both sides and resolving them efficiently. They will also be monitoring services and applications 24/7. Providing tools and infrastructure updates will help to eliminate downtime as well.

From the look of it, SRE is going to improve considerably over the next couple of years. Simply put, the industry is constantly innovating and improving its tools to fulfill the needs of today’s systems and tomorrow’s products.

Tools Used by SREs

Below are the common tools that site reliability engineers use to make their process more efficient, smoother, and effective:

• Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch and NewRelic
• Incident Management/On-call: PagerDuty and VictorOps
• Project Management and Issue Tracking: Trello and Jira
• Infrastructure Orchestration: SaltStack and Terraform

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Should You Hire Site Reliability Engineers?The demand for site reliability engineers is rapidly increasing in various organizations. It’s a challenging role that requires both coding knowledge and automation skills. While some organizations may avoid trendy roles and technologies, SREs are important players in building better IT services.Having such engineers in your organization will make your process smoother and reduce your costs while enhancing the reliability of your software. Therefore, Radixweb is the right place to hire DevOps specialist who can help you with DevOps and the best SRE practices.Contact us to hire SREs today!