SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs: Define and track Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to objectively measure and improve reliability targets.
Gradual Changes: Prioritize small, incremental changes and deployments to reduce the risk of system failures and facilitate faster rollbacks if issues arise.
Automation First: Automate critical processes like build testing, deployments, and incident response to enhance speed, consistency, and recovery capabilities.
Error Budgets: Utilize error budgets—a defined tolerance for unreliability—to balance the pace of innovation with the need for system stability, driving continuous improvement.
Daily Tasks and Incident Management
Monitoring System Health
SREs design and implement robust monitoring systems that focus on alerting based on symptoms and user experience rather than just raw outages. This ensures critical issues are caught early.
Root Cause Analysis
They meticulously analyze logs, metrics, and traces to pinpoint the exact root causes of system failures, ensuring that problems are truly resolved and don't recur.
Post-Mortem Culture
A crucial part of their role is leading and participating in blameless post-mortems after incidents. The goal is to learn from failures and implement preventative measures to improve future resilience.
Enhance System Resilience
SREs continuously collaborate with development teams to integrate reliability best practices into the software development lifecycle, aiming to build more resilient and scalable systems from the ground up.
