SRE Principles and Practices for Your Project 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is crucial for scaling software systems. The SRE process is now an integral aspect of IT since most companies need to ensure reliability across large projects. Using code to support operations, SRE functions as an efficient implementation of DevOps. 

Heorhi Shynkevich, Senior Systems Engineer, EPAM, takes you through the core principles and practices of SRE so you can better understand why and how it can improve business efficiency and software lifecycles. 

What is SRE? 

SRE is a series of practices designed to improve system operations so that developers can focus on achieving velocity and reliability at scale. 

The SRE approach gradually expanded as the IT industry started to shift into the DevOps cultural mindset. While a sysadmin traditionally took on the operations role of production, the nature of the job title contributed to a further split between development and operations. 

Seven fundamental SRE principles 

SRE facilitates system and service reliability. It accomplishes that with seven core principles. 

Embracing risk 
No system is perfect. SRE accepts that things will go wrong. However, while errors are a problem for system reliability (especially for systems used by consumers), site reliability engineers are expected to lean into potential failures. 

Service level objectives 
Service level objectives (SLO) are predetermined performance targets outlined within a service level agreement (SLA). The objectives are measured against service level indicators (SLI), the raw metrics of the current system. 

“We heavily utilize SLOs in our day-to-day work to track what service or what part of it requires immediate attention. There are a lot of different ways to define SLOs. However, the most common one is to calculate something called ‘error budget’. Usually this is some percentage; for example, failed to total requests. When something starts behaving incorrectly, it starts ‘burning,’ and that's where we as SREs are notified and pulled in to resolve issue before it becomes an incident involving customers.” 

Heorhi Shynkevich, Senior Systems Engineer, EPAM 

Eliminating toil 
Toil refers to the tedious work or repetitive tasks an SRE team must do. SRE attempts to automate as many tasks as possible to streamline operations and improve efficiency. The core principle of eliminating toil improves pipeline velocity and is crucial to scaling larger systems. 

Monitoring 
Monitoring is crucial for system reliability, ensuring all services run as intended. Monitoring tools help rectify errors or issues with minimal delay. Tracking uptime and availability acts as fail-safe— the aspects of secure services. 

Automation 
To limit manual labor as much as possible, SRE posits automation as a crucial component of system scalability. Eliminating human effort will lead to increased velocity as more team members can focus on the tasks that demand human intervention. 

“It's always a debate whether it is worth spending time automating everything or doing it partially. In my experience, it's always a two-part question — "Are we going to spend more time in the future working on it manually?" and "Will this automation allow us to manage more with less?" If either of the answers to this question is yes, you should spend time figuring out automation for it.  

For example, by automating the deployment of monitoring utilities and templating most of the configuration on our on-prem high load infrastructure, we were able to decrease lead time for monitoring onboarding from a couple of weeks to a couple of hours. That also allowed us to increase the number of environments we can effectively support exponentially, from two to three, to 10-15.” 

Heorhi Shynkevich, Senior Systems Engineer, EPAM 

Release engineering 
As one of the SRE principles, release engineering refers to delivering software consistently and repeatedly. Creating a series of one-time services that cannot be repeated is a lousy use of automation and introduces unnecessary toil. Instead, engineers who discover improved operational practices should implement those enhancements repeatedly to enhance deployment consistency. 

Simplicity 
Reliable systems are straightforward — the more complexity, the more risk and the higher the likelihood of failure. A simple system is easy to manipulate, adjust, test and monitor, all with less toil. The goal of SRE is a boring, uneventful and mundane project timeline. 

Final thoughts 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a development philosophy that offers many benefits to organizations. The core principles of SRE will not only support the cultural mindset of DevOps, which is typical of an integrated development project, but they will also lead to system efficiencies that result in massive system improvements. More importantly, SRE delivers the reliability needed to achieve customer satisfaction. Any organization can benefit from SRE; that’s why SRE is undoubtedly a well-recognized discipline and methodology. 

Check out our open SRE jobs internationally if you’re open to new career opportunities.