The role of site reliability engineering (SRE) in delivering a reliable product

Driving digital transformation is at the core of the CIO’s transformation agenda, allowing them to rapidly innovate and iterate with a focus on customer experience. With this focus, organizations are increasingly adopting an IT model that is agile and product-centric enabling them to effectively connect with customers and quickly respond by rapidly launching new products and services.
 
This product-centric delivery model also paves the way for a flourishing platform ecosystem supported with set of continuous delivery initiatives allowing enterprises to accelerate their engineering velocity to launch services at a rapid scale.
 
While speed to market is a critical KPI helping teams significantly reduce cycle time and improve their delivery effectiveness, it needs to be balanced with a reliability focus, ensuring that the end-results fulfill user expectations in terms of quality, accessibility, security, and so on. Delivering reliable products and services has now become fundamental to an organization’s ability to thrive in the digital world.
 
SRE principles help to maximize the engineering velocity of development teams while keeping platforms stable and reliable. SRE applies software engineering principles and automation to improve the reliability of platforms and eliminate toil from the operations team and help them to refocus their attention to high-value innovations.
 
SRE extends the focus of reliability across all phases of a service lifecycle, from dev to ops, as depicted below:
 
1.  SRE as a role gets embedded in the operations team to drive actions for high-velocity changes and feature launches without compromising the stability and long-term viability of services.

2.  The SRE team works closely with the engineering team to create resilience blueprints and patterns for various single points of failure that the dev team can employ when building a new product.

3.  SRE teams continuously shift left operational dependencies into the build process through an automated CICD/DevSecOps pipeline and provide early engagement consulting on operational readiness factors to the dev/engineering teams.

4.  They leverage data and analytics for developing and executing strategic decisions on release deployments and operations.

5.  They employ continuous and automated evaluation of code against key SLO’s (Service Level Objectives) as it moves through the delivery pipeline from dev to prod, allowing engineers to fix issues before they reach production

6.  They establish full visibility into identifying exactly what is draining an error budget and the rate at which it is doing so, and also qualify the overall impact those issues could have on service.

7.  They create and manage an automation backlog for reducing manual intervention and remediation efforts. They enable AIOPS-enriched self-healing automation, incident orchestration, collaboration, and retrofits to improve the resiliency of production systems.
 
We advocate for clients to embed SRE principles early in the product engineering lifecycle to build and manage a reliable digital footprint for enterprises.
 
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