Shaun Abram
Technology and Leadership Blog
Subscribe to RSS FeedBeginning with SRE
This post is an introduction into some basic SRE practices we have been implementing at my company recently.
I’ve written before on SRE, including on SRE resources, SLIs, SLOs and SLAs, and Creating an SRE team, but this is a more practical guide to getting started.
Tags: servicelevelagreements, sitereliabilityengineering, sla, sli, slo, sre, thesrebook
SRE Metrics
A very quick post on some of the most commonly used SRE metrics: The Four Golden Metrics, and RED & USE.
Tags: 4goldenmetrics, metrics, sitereliabilityengineering, sre
Creating an SRE team
If you wanted to build an SRE team at your company, how would you go about it? How would you structure it?
Tags: seekingsrebook, sitereliabilityengineering, sre, sreworkbook
SRE Resources
The following are a list of SRE resources I’m finding useful. I will update it as I find more. The good news is that most of the books (including all 3 of the Google SRE books) are available for free download at https://landing.google.com/sre/books.
Tags: seekingsrebook, sitereliabilityengineering, sre, srebooks, sreworkbook, thesrebook
eBook Summary: What Is SRE?
“What Is SRE? An Introduction to Site Reliability Engineering” (registration required but free), is an ebook by Kurt Andersen & Craig Sebenik, published by O’Reilly. The following is a summary (abridged copy and paste) of the parts I found most useful, with a few of my own notes. The original is about 9,000 words; this is about 2,000.
Tags: books, sitereliabilityengineering, sre, summary
SRE vs DevOps
I’m really enjoying the Seeking SRE book. Chapter 12 covers SRE vs DevOps; a community sourced compare and contrast type discussion.
My favorite description is from Thomas Limoncelli, who suggested that:
DevOps engineers focus on the SDLC pipeline with occasional responsibilities for production operations. SREs focus on production operations with occasional responsibilities for the SDLC pipeline.
Tags: books, devops, seekingsrebook, sitereliabilityengineering, sre
Book chapter summary: Postmortem Culture, from the SRE Book
I’m really enjoying reading the excellent “SRE Book“. Chapter 15 “Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure” in particular, really struck a chord with me. The following is a slightly summarized version of it.
TLDR: Failures are inevitable, especially in distributed systems. To learn from them, document in Postmortems, avoiding blame, and share the newly gained learnings across your org.
Tags: blameless, postmortems, RCA, rootcauseanalysis, sitereliabilityengineering, sre, summary, thesrebook
Talk summary: SRE principles by Tori Wieldt @ AWS re:Invent 2018
I caught a talk by Tori Wieldt at the New Relic booth at AWS re:Invent on “SRE principles”. Even though it was a short talk in the expo hall, rather than a formal scheduled one, it had a ton of good SRE material.
Tags: aws, newrelic, reinvent, reinvent2018, sitereliabilityengineering, sre, summary, Testing
2022 VOID Report Summary
The following is a summary of the 2022 VOID report.
The original is ~10,000 words. This is ~1500.
Tags: incidents, summary, voidreport
Book chapter summary: Managing Incidents
This is a slight abridged version of Chapter 14, “Managing Incidents, by Andrew Stribblehill from the excellent “SRE Book“. (Original is 2200 words, this is 1200)
Tags: sitereliabilityengineering, sre, summary, thesrebook
Development and delivery practices for team success
Most metrics for measuring developer productivity, such as lines of code or issues closed, are notoriously ineffective. But the research in the excellent State of Devops report shows that, rather than focusing on local metrics and individual developer performance, it is better to look at overall development and delivery practices. Specifically, there are metrics that predict and reflect a team’s ability to successfully deliver working software into production, including deployment frequency, and the mean time to restore service after an incident. This articles discusses why some metrics are useless, and takes a closer look at the recommendations in the 2019 State of Devops report.
Tags: accelerate, developerproductivity, devops, fourkeymetrics, stateofdevops
Report Summary: Accelerate State of DevOps 2019
This is an abridged version of The Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019; essentially a cut and paste of the most salient parts. The original is about 18,000 words; This is about 2,500 words.
I highly recommend reading the original in its entirety, if you have time, and I’m a big fan of the Accelerate book too. As with all the other summaries I create, this just as as way to help me digest and understand an excellent article.
Tags: accelerate, devops, fourkeymetrics, jezhumble, nicoleforsgren, stateofdevops, summary
Is Apdex useful?
I’ve been trying to figure out what SLOs to define for some services recently, and wondering if Apdex is a useful metric. (See my previous post on the difference between SLIs, SLOs and SLAs)
Tags: apdex, applicationperformanceindex, sitereliabilityengineering, slo, SLOs, sre
SLI, SLO and SLA
What are SLIs, SLOs and SLAs?
Service Level Indicators (SLIs) are metrics that you choose to measure the health and performance of your services. Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are the desired target for those indicators. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) build on this and include the consequences of not meeting those targets. All are fundamental to Site Reliability Engineering.
In this post, I’ll try to explain each in more detail, how they relate to each other, and some examples of each.
Tags: seekingsrebook, servicelevelagreements, sitereliabilityengineering, sla, SLAs, sli, SLIs, slo, SLOs, sre, thesrebook
Top 5 announcements from AWS re:Invent 2018
AWS re:Invent has just completed. It was a huge event with 50,000+ attendees across 7 of the biggest hotels in Vegas, and many new service announcements.
Serverless continue to get lots of attention with new lambda enhancements and better container support. The “hybrid” model of using your own datacenter in conjunction with a cloud provider has been fully embraced by AWS with the new “Outposts” capabilities. Machine learning also got much love with several new services using and supporting it. Read on for my top picks from this week’s announcements…
Tags: aws, awsreinvent, reinvent2018