Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines software engineering principles with operations to create scalable and reliable software systems. It originated at Google and has since been adopted by many tech companies to ensure the reliability and performance of their services.
Site Reliability Engineering aims to create software systems that are highly available, scalable, and resilient to failures, ensuring a positive user experience and business continuity.
SRE focuses on defining and measuring Service Level Objectives, which are specific, quantitative targets for the reliability and performance of a service. SLOs help align the engineering team's efforts with business goals and user expectations.
Error Budgets are a key concept in SRE that quantifies the acceptable level of downtime or errors in a service over a given period. By setting and managing error budgets, teams can make informed decisions about when to prioritize feature development versus reliability improvements.
SRE emphasizes automation to minimize manual intervention and reduce the risk of human error. Automation tools and processes are used for tasks such as deployment, monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
SRE teams implement robust monitoring and alerting systems to detect and respond to issues proactively. They monitor key metrics related to reliability, performance, and user experience, and set up alerts to notify them of potential problems.
SRE teams follow structured incident management processes to quickly respond to and resolve incidents that impact service reliability or performance. This includes practices such as incident triage, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
SRE involves proactive capacity planning to ensure that services can handle expected traffic and workload fluctuations without degradation in performance or reliability. Capacity planning is based on empirical data and predictive modeling.
SRE promotes a disciplined approach to change management to minimize the risk of service disruptions caused by software deployments or configuration changes. This includes practices such as canary deployments, gradual rollouts, and feature flags.
SRE teams apply engineering principles to improve the reliability and resilience of systems, including practices such as fault tolerance, load balancing, redundancy, and chaos engineering.
SRE encourages collaboration between development, operations, and other cross-functional teams to align on shared goals and priorities. This includes practices such as blameless postmortems and shared on-call responsibilities.
SRE is an iterative process that emphasizes continuous improvement through feedback, measurement, and experimentation. Teams regularly review and refine their practices to enhance service reliability and performance over time.
