Navigating the Evolution: How SRE Is Revolutionizing IT Operations

Site reliability engineering is a new practice that has been growing in popularity among many businesses. Also known as SRE, the new activity puts a premium on monitoring, tracking bugs, and creating systems and automation that solve the problem in the long term.

Nowadays, most companies get fond of deploying band-aid solutions that often leave them with flawed systems that easily fall apart when bugs arise. SRE practice fixes that by putting a premium on proactively monitoring problems and creating long-term solutions. As more companies adopt SRE, they change the way IT departments operate.

What Is IT Ops?

Information technology operations (IT Ops) is the discipline of overseeing the management of information technology infrastructure and the lifecycle of applications. IT Ops focuses on ensuring that the company's IT infrastructure is healthy, secure, and scalable. IT Ops is a broad term that encompasses a variety of departments, each contributing to the overall success of IT operations.

SRE vs. DevOps

With regards to SRE vs. DevOps, it helps to think of one as the goal and the other as the means of getting to that goal. DevOps intends to bridge development and operations into one. Site reliability engineering makes that intention a possibility. So, DevOps is the goal and SRE is the method from a bird’s eye point of view. DevOps talks about what needs to get done to align the objectives and activities of development and operations. SRE answers the question “How do we make that happen?”

Here are some ways that SRE positively impacts a business’ operations.

1. Software-First Approach

Any company maintaining an SRE team will often hear them talking about automating processes with software. At the heart of site reliability engineering is the goal of automating processes that solve issues once and for all. Most misconceptions around SRE are that its goal is to spot the leaks and patch them up. But SRE is more about creating a system that automatically changes the pipe when leaks happen.

Much of SRE is about developing software and systems that automate incident management. This automation-first mindset puts a premium on system builders in IT and teaches the whole company to adapt to the same school of thought in everything we do. Why stick with manual tasks when you can automate them?

2. Focus on SLOs and Error Budget

One of the priorities of an SRE team is to determine a service-level objective or a bare minimum goal of availability. The SLO is the minimum requirement a team must need in terms of the availability of a system or software to users. The next thing they would then do is set an error budget, which indicates the margin of error allowed for a system.

What this means is that SRE gives importance to commitment when it comes to providing exceptional customer experience. Even the way SRE teams approach bug tracking should have a user experience approach. This, among many other SRE practices, helps bridge the gap between how people use systems and how developers can design them to meet minimum standards of excellence.

3. Proactive Stability Assurance

What makes a great site reliability engineer is one’s ability to be proactive. Given that 93% of SREs correlate their work with “monitoring and alerting,” critical problem-solving skills are a must. With that available skillset in IT operations, it affects the whole department and even the whole company, pushing for a solution-oriented culture as a whole. A proactive culture brings greater stability assurance to systems and operations.

4. Dev and Ops Collaboration

For site reliability management to be effective, collaboration and alignment must happen. This is probably why 81% of SREs do most of their work in the office. While incidences of work-from-home setups amongst SREs have increased over the years, the point is that SRE practices revolve around collaboration.

The SRE culture advocates for business objective alignment and monitoring using service level agreements (SLAs) and metrics that help us understand performance and error management. The main job description of SRE teams is to spot errors in systems, find the root problems, and resolve them. By seeking to maintain a healthy system in collaboration with all players and departments, an SRE or SRE team encourages hand-in-hand work and somehow “forces” us to band together to solve system issues.

5. Commoditizing Efficiency and SRE Solutions

SRE roles and responsibilities can be quite extensive and, thus, expensive, especially for smaller organizations. The cost of having your incident management system, for instance, can be astronomical, which might be justified if you’re a company like Facebook or Google. But what if you’re a tech startup or a small to medium tech company?

In response to the need to commoditize more efficient practices, there has been an increase in the incident management system market over the years.

Adopting the SRE Model

Technology is forever changing the way companies operate, and many of the activities that businesses jump into start to become more digitized. SRE is allowing all people from various practices, both tech and non-tech-related, to take a software development approach to everything. As teams deploy an SRE maturity model, SRE principles, practices, and skills into the mix, it revolutionizes the way we approach problems and come up with solutions.

Here’s how a team might take on an SRE model or approach in their company.

• Define a framework
  The first step to deploying an SRE model is defining the framework. Decide on the parameters, tools, and culture that your department or team might take on and resolve to use those systems put in place.
• Hire skilled engineers
  There’s a debate as to whether SRE teams need developers who are great at operations or operations people who are great at development. Albeit the chicken and egg banter, what matters is that SRE teams must have people who have an understanding of both the engineering and system application and operation side of the game.
• Implement tools and technologies
  SRE teams use every available tool, including open source projects for SRE to bring greater stability to a company’s systems. A company will also need an incident management system put in place. With good SRE and Incident Management tools, smaller companies can work on incidents even with on-call or part-time SREs to come in only when necessary, thus improving engineering delivery considerably, making faster recovery, and reducing SLO breaches.
• Update processes
  With the way that problems adapt, solution-makers need to adapt too. SRE is built on the principle of adaptability — being able to shift, pivot, and change when times change. As the old cliche goes, the only constant in this world is change. And in the uncertain, ambiguous, and volatile nature of the world that we live in where things that could go wrong will most likely go wrong (as Murphy’s law states), adaptability in a team or organization can be extremely helpful.
  One aspect that helps SRE teams pivot much easier is having the right IT management software tools to better monitor, analyze, and implement solutions to fix incidents, bugs, and problems at the operational level. Equipping an SRE or SRE team makes it much easier to create solutions to prevalent problems.
• Change the culture to support the model
  At the heart of SRE is not a system or software, but a culture. That culture highlights three non-negotiables: proactivity, solution-focus, and user experience. A department dedicated to DevOps and SRE, and the whole company, for that matter, should support that model.

Conclusion

To remain competitive in the evolving landscape, organizations are encouraged to explore and implement the SRE model. Embracing the SRE model is not just a technological shift but a cultural one, emphasizing proactivity, solution focus, and user experience.