What Should The Below Roles Know And How Should They Approach SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)?
Site Reliability Engineer works with all team members of a software development team at different points in time to achieve innovation with system reliability.
Businesses are under pressure to innovate and primarily rely on digital channels to connect with their customers wherever they are. Complex architectures are being used to meet consumer and market demands, resulting in a mix of cloud-native applications, SaaS, platform as a service, and dependence on external services.
On the other hand, traditional operational models are not made to keep up with the accelerating speed of digital business transformation. Many IT and Operations teams also need more expertise to manage developing technologies and novel approaches to the delivery of software products. IT and Management teams are unable to exceed customer expectations or accomplish business or reliability goals as a result. Additionally, because of this talent imbalance, there is a needless conflict between development, operations, and product owners.
Site Reliability Engineering, introduced by Google, aimed to solve all such problems with better visibility, data, and instant response methods. However, integrating SRE into your existing or new project is more challenging than the said done. SRE performs multiple jobs in project development and aligns with different team members at different times to achieve a business’s reliability and innovation objectives.
In this post, let’s see how different key players of project development can leverage SRE to achieve their individual goals, culminating in long-term organizational goals.
Product Manager
A software product manager spends most of his time on how to delight customers with new features and high-quality services. The thing which hinders his ambitions is maintaining the stability and reliability of the system when a new change or feature is pushed. But product managers can use techniques from site reliability engineering to deliver a consistently delightful end-user experience while maintaining the system’s reliability. They can also adapt to the data-driven approach of SRE for prioritizing the reliability of the most crucial features important to the company’s business objectives. It helps them prioritize the reliability roadmap and set up tradeoffs between shipping new features and maintaining availability/reliability. They can set up SLOs and error budgets and can achieve the right balance between innovation and reliability.
Engineering Manager
Engineering managers are appointed to solve the technical challenges of the project. Engineering leadership continuously focuses on optimizing processes while eliminating Toil and maximizing revenue when it comes to maintaining reliability while ensuring faster delivery of programs. Integrating SRE principles here helps them identify manual, tactical, repetitive, no enduring value tasks, and automatable jobs in a process known as Toil. As Google mentioned, “Toil tends to expand and, if left unchecked, can quickly fill 100% of everyone’s time” Site Reliability Engineering steps in to reduce Toil and scale up services; that is genuinely an “Engineering” effort. SRE helps Engineering Managers to introduce permanent improvements in the service and system. They bring software engineering principles into operations and take the help of a design-driven approach to solve a problem.
Developer
Earlier, developers used to work in an isolated environment and were unaware of how their code would be used or deployed. DevOps bring down this silo from the development and operations team, providing them with a broader perspective of a complete development environment and the steps required to release software. SRE helps them implement the understanding of how the code should be built, stored in the source code repository, how it will be compiled, will be tested, packed, and deployed.
Customer Support
The customer support team needs better visibility of the incident and processes to respond promptly and provide a solution. Since SRE has brought monitoring to another level, i.e., observability, you can make your system observable where you get end-to-end visibility of what is causing problems with the system or how systems interact with each other. You get more and better visibility about logs, metrics, error rates, traces, and even network interface information of your application and infrastructure. An APM (application performance monitoring) tool that only supports tracking your application’s code performance, observability tools expose you complete metrics like request count, details about successful/failed requests, etc., in the case of a web service. You get traces of how your application performs in any given environment and what support it needs.
IT Ops
Ultimately, it’s IT and Operations responsible for maximizing business performance while meeting and satisfying the needs of cross-department like on-demand capability scalability, support for automating processes, maintaining the performance of data centers or infrastructure, or else the list is endless. ITOps can leverage SRE as it brings clarity in the face of complexity. Integrating SRE helps you automate most IT operations jobs while providing visibility, context, and the most suited action plan in real time. Moreover, you can perform real-time discovery of the health of your applications, infrastructure, cloud, IoT, etc. You also get the end-to-end logs and events these are generating while having access to real-time context generate that derive relationships and helps stay ahead of the evolving needs.
Final Thoughts
Adopting world-class site reliability practices helps you anticipate incidents before they occur, alert you, and prepare you with insights to respond proactively. It helps align distributed workforce and their day-to-day tasks and ensures features are pushed without breaking the system. In the end, SRE helps accelerate the speed of innovation without compromising on availability.
