Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Best Practices and Strategies

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

In our blog post Distributed Systems Monitoring: the Four Golden Signals, we mentioned the Google Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, where Site Reliability Engineering (SER) is a discipline used by IT and software engineering teams to proactively create and maintain more reliable services. Its origin is based on the fact that Google experienced (at the beginning of the 2000s) unprecedented growth and its consequence: the need for reliability in availability, performance and trust. Since 2003, Google has extended the concept of SER to the software development industry, seeking to combine the functions of two teams: operations and software development to work in a coordinated manner, seeking the automation of repetitive tasks in operations, the use of tools developed for monitoring and automated processes for change management, analysis and incident resolution. Since then, other companies began to adopt the same model and employ site reliability engineers. Currently, the SRE position has become more common in large organizations: according to a report by the DevOps Institute in 2021, based on a survey of 2000 executives, 22% of organizations have already adopted the SER model, with its principles and best practices.

SRE Key Principles

SRE as such can be carried out by a person or a group of collaborators, who must ensure and monitor system availability, latency and optimal performance, efficiency, change management and monitoring, as well as emergency response and capacity planning. Their goal: to improve user experience and reduce IT operating costs. Its principles are:

• Risk Assessment: It consists of a clear understanding of the risk of unexpected failures, which is fundamental to improving system reliability.
• Service Level Objectives (SLO,[OD1] ): SLOs help define goals to achieve system reliability, such as uptime. Benchmarks are provided for engineering teams to meet in order to provide reliable services.
• Getting rid of hard work: It refers to getting rid of manual labor to keep a service running. SREs aim to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more critical activities. It seeks to balance automation and reliability.
• Distributed system monitoring: It involves analyzing system data to identify bottlenecks, anomalies, and performance issues. SRE uses tracking tools to proactively address issues.
• Incident Response: SRE forecasts resource needs based on history data and expected growth. Proper capacity planning ensures that systems can withstand peak loads without performance degradation.
• Capacity Planning: La SRE pronostica las necesidades de recursos basándose en datos históricos y el crecimiento esperado. Una planificación adecuada de la capacidad garantiza que los sistemas puedan soportar cargas máximas sin que exista una degradación en el rendimiento.
• Emergency Response: SRE is prepared for emergencies and carries out practices on disaster recovery scenarios; procedural guides are maintained and critical incidents are quickly responded to.

Roles and Responsibilities of an SRE Engineer

SRE individuals or teams collect and analyze metrics, logs, and tracking to gain a deeper understanding of the performance of their systems. Roles and responsibilities in SRE engineering can be:

• SRE Engineer: They are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the SRE team, such as monitoring, incident management and response, and automation.
• SRE Manager: They supervise the SRE team and set goals, develop processes, and ensure the team meets its objectives.
• SRE Architect: They design and implement new systems and processes for the SRE team, as well as ensuring that the team’s work is aligned with the overall objectives of the organization.
• SRE Developer: They write code to automate tasks, improve reliability, and add new features to SRE team systems.
• SRE Tool Engineer: They develop and maintain the tools that the SRE team uses to do their job. This role can be performed by an SRE engineer in smaller organizations.

Of course, these roles depend on the needs of the organization, always seeking to maintain the reliability of the organization’s systems.

SRE Best Practices

Carrying out best practices allows achieving better levels of user satisfaction through collaboration between the development and IT operations teams, with continuous improvements:

• Lean on automation to disengage from repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
• Make sure you use the same tools to automate and improve operations that developers use in software development and enhancements.
• Perform analysis and measurements by putting yourself in the user’s place, even relying on the four golden signals.
• Design, implement and adjust Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs), supporting you on a single observability platform to reduce tool profusion and be able to observe and manage in a unified way.
• Allocate error budgets to continuously deploy new features within acceptable risk levels.

Incident management with clear processes of what to do, who it belongs to, how to escalate an incident is also recommended, in addition to implementing a retrospective analysis (postmortem) after an incident or outage occurred in a system.

Strategies for SRE Implementation

The following is recommended in order to implement SRE effectively:

• Start with a proof of concept, and iteratively. It will be essential to choose appropriate tools and applications to carry out the proofs of concept, providing the data and metrics on behavior. Also, the application should allow you to make engineering changes to it, as needed.
• Develop a culture of reliability and steady improvement, reinforcing the team with training for the improvement of internal skills, the focus on prioritization and the creation of a learning community. Additional training for leaders on cultural concepts and practices in the organization may be required. The concepts of SLO and SLI must be clear, since measuring whether systems meet expectations requires a mindset change focused on user experience.
• Create your SRE community and formalized processes in the organization. Building an SRE community in the organization is important for learning, but also for having a knowledge base on best practices, with safety mechanisms and aligned processes. Make sure you do not lose knowledge over time. It is also important to embrace failure so that the team learns from mistakes. Try to rely on monitoring tools that prevent alert fatigue, improving the experience of your IT team. It also includes your suppliers and engineering partners, to make sure your SLAs also reflect the same goals.
• Encourage a data-driven mindset. Responsibility-free data collection and retrospective analysis is recommended so that each team member feels free to share their experience. Retrospective analysis should be undertaken to learn from mistakes, including action items and the assignment of an owner.
• Always keep in mind that SRE is a methodology that is being implemented as a standardized set of engineering practices to balance the speed of function development with operational reliability risks. DevOps encompasses collaboration between development teams and operations to streamline software development, testing, and delivery. It aims to shorten development and delivery cycles, which is in line with SRE practices. Therefore, DevOps and SRE do not compete for methodologies, but completing each other and must be integrated to:
  • Reducing organizational isolation, in which each team works in isolation.
  • Create the right environment for gradual and constant change.
  • Accept failure and iterations as standard practice.
  • Use automation tools for the benefit of IT and development teams.
  • Collect and have reliable and accurate metrics.
  • Improve crisis response.

Essential Tools for SRE

Automation helps reduce operational load and improve efficiency and configuration management enabling SRE teams to respond quickly and effectively to unexpected events. It is recommended to rely on tools for:

• Monitoring and Observability: These tools provide real-time visibility into the performance and health of systems to prevent or detect problems immediately and take corrective action. Notably, observability enables reliability engineering teams to effectively understand and manage internal system status.
• Automation and Orchestration: These tools contribute to reducing operational load and stress, improving efficiency and expertise for the SRE team, while incident management tools allow to respond quickly and effectively to unexpected events, with a clear definition of courses of action and escalation.
• Configuration and Deployment Management: These tools help applications to be delivered safely, reliably and efficiently, also providing the elements for proper planning, coordination and execution of systems capabilities, in addition to supporting the proactive approach that you wish to achieve with SRE.

Common Challenges in SRE Implementation and How to Overcome Them

Any SRE engineer faces challenges that can be overcome with the right tools:

• Monitoring complexity and over-alerting: Comprehensive and robust tools must be selected to monitor and configure the proper metrics to monitor servers and applications.
• Maintain infrastructure and application reliability: Monitoring tools and data must be available to analyze and meet expectations on service levels.
• Difficulty for managing incidents: Tools must be used to detect incidents and perform root cause analysis [OD2] . Incident logs must also be maintained, along with the definition of incident management policies and procedures to be solved immediately, without violating service levels.
• Lack of ticket prioritization: It is of utmost importance to prioritize tickets based on the impact on the user experience. It is also possible to rely on automation for repetitive manual tasks or trigger resolution processes that do not require human intervention in order to focus efforts on more critical incidents or processes.

Of course, it is essential that these tools are supported by communication and regular updates of performance monitoring and management resources, as well as encouraging openness to constantly share the truth about incidents.

The Future of SRE: Trends and Evolutions

Although the SRE practice was initially adopted only by large companies, it is expected that smaller companies will also adopt it. It is also expected that automation and Artificial Intelligence will be widely integrated into this practice, especially due to the lack of staff devoted to IT security and the need to improve their execution and experience in their daily work of ensuring the operation of the systems and the best user experience.

Another important aspect is the cloud: organizations are still looking for agility, scalability and efficiency in infrastructure costs, so the trend to adopt cloud-native technologies persists. For example, containers and microservices have revolutionized the way applications are developed, deployed, and managed; and developers are focused on writing code without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. All this creates a sum of permanent challenges now and in the future: the increasing complexity of cloud-native architectures, the need to support a wider range of workloads, and the need to be more agile and responsive to change. In this scenario, SRE trends in the future will be:

• Focus on automation: Automation will be increasingly used to reduce work and free engineers up their time and efforts so they may focus on more strategic tasks.
• Focus on observability: Adopting observability tools to gain deep insights into system performance to identify and troubleshoot issues more quickly.
• Focus on safety: Tendency towards a more proactive approach to safety. It incorporates security into the development lifecycle and seeks to ensure that systems are resistant to attacks.
• Focus on collaboration: SRE teams collaborate more closely with other teams, such as development, security, and product management. Reliability will be sought from the early stages of the development process.

Conclusion

As we have seen, SRE arose from Google’s need to manage massive and more distributed infrastructures, while at the same time seeking to meet the increasing expectations of users in terms of performance and availability. Those same needs have led companies of any industry and size to adopt SRE practices. It has also become clear that DevOps and SRE complement each other and ensure excellent user experience and optimal systems performance. Of course, robust and intelligent monitoring tools and platforms that give all the elements of value (data, analysis, observability and automation) are required to implement the four golden signals in system monitoring (latency, traffic, errors and saturation) and prepare for the SRE trends of today and in the future: automation, observability, security and collaboration.