The essential Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) discipline foundations are key pillars in managing technology systems with a focus on reliability. These fundamentals focus on close collaboration between development and operations teams to ensure systems are highly reliable and scalable.
Automation: Automation is essential for SRE. Repetitive and error-prone tasks should be automated to free engineers from manual tasks and allow them to focus on higher-value tasks.
Measurement: Measurement is fundamental to SRE. Accurate metrics, such as Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are essential for evaluating a system's reliability and performance.
Capacity planning: Forecasting the capacity needed to meet demand is essential. Capacity must be planned according to SLOs to ensure that they are met and no service interruptions occur.
Scalability: Systems must be designed to scale efficiently. Horizontal and vertical scalability is crucial to handle changing loads and ensure reliable performance.
Errors and downtime: SRE is not about avoiding downtime at all costs, but rather managing errors effectively. Planned and unplanned downtime must be managed so that SLOs are met.
Resilience: Resilience involves designing systems to be resistant to failure. This is achieved through practices such as redundancy, fault tolerance, and self-healing.
Participation in the development cycle: SRE works closely with development teams from the beginning of the software lifecycle to ensure that reliability is a key consideration in the design and implementation of services.
Define service objectives: SRE and development teams should work together to establish clear and measurable service objectives, such as SLOs, which will be used to measure reliability.
These fundamentals or principles are the SRE basis and are constantly applied in the management of production systems, establishing a solid foundation to guarantee a high level of reliability, scalability, efficiency and quality of service.