Site Reliability Engineering

Let’s talk about something fundamental, something often relegated to the last minute, but which, when embraced early, can elevate the craft of software engineering from mere coding to true engineering excellence. I’m speaking of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs). Remind me what they are again SLI - Service Level Indicator A quantitative metric for a service’s performance, as experienced by the user of the service. It is a measure of a property of the service that is a good proxy for your user experience. ...

Background Any software that has ever been built has had a bug or problem of some sort. Generally, these bugs might be silly things that aren’t of any major concern - like a button looking odd or only clicking when the mouse is at a certain part of it. Some bugs, on the other hand, could have serious impact on the users of the software or those that are indirectly affected by the software - e.g. a problem with the billing system in an energy billing platform, could potentially impact the amount the customers have to pay - what if the bug resulted in final amount being multiplied by a certain arbitrary number! Imagine the reputation of the energy company who are clients of a Billing SaaS provider if such a bug were to happen. ...

What is SRE? SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. That’s just a lot of words. What does it mean though? Site Reliability engineering is what IT operations would be if it was run by software engineers. That’s an interesting take. But it was not helpful in clarifying anything about SRE just yet. Let’s try probing more. How did we go from Development to SRE? You know the part where people deploy software and then ensure things run fine in production. ...