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Rundown of LinkedIn’s SRE practices
Introduction LinkedIn has one of the most robust Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices around. After all, as the social network of record for jobseekers and salespeople, it is the 6th most trafficked website in the world, with over 1.5 billion unique visits per month. LinkedIn’s Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) ensure all that traffic gets served…
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Analysis of SRE and platform setup at 10+ tech companies
In this article, you will see a breakdown of the platform setup and SRE practices within 12 non-FAANG technology companies. This is based on the case studies by Andrios Robert. “There is a lot of content available on how Google did [Site Reliability Engineering]; let’s uncover what happens with the rest of the world.” —…
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Reduce software outage risk with passive guardrails
Shocking fact: only 10-25% of software outages are because of hardware or network failure. The rest are the result of human error like misconfiguration — paraphrasing Martin Kleppman, Designing Data-Intensive Applications In this article, I will share with you how setting up passive guardrails in and around developer workflows can reduce the frequency and severity…
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Where in team topologies does Site Reliability Engineering fit in?
We will explore the workings of the Team Topologies model and how Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams can fit into it. In more detail, I will share with you the following: Let’s get started. Overview of team topologies Team topologies is a relatively new model/framework, having been officially introduced in 2019. It’s a response by…
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Rundown of Uber’s SRE practice
Introduction Every time you push a button like the one below to request an Uber ride, you activate a sequence of (micro)service requests. You’d never know unless you look under the hood because most of these services run solely in the background. Yet every service contributes to the start and completion of the Uber ride…
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How Jaeger tracing fits into software observability
In this article, I will share how tracing and more specifically Jaeger tracing can fit into your wider software observability strategy. Before we get into tracing, let’s define observability. What is observability? Observability is a comprehensive means of gaining data on how software services perform in production. This data gives you a picture of the…
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SRE’s role in safer infrastructure-as-code
This article explores 2 simple ways for SREs to drive better practices and code hygiene within infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tooling like Terraform. Why bother? Because of its centrality to cloud infrastructure efficiency, it’s highly likely that you will get involved with an IAC problem at some point in your SRE career. I will mention Terraform from…
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Building the case for starting a software reliability team
This article aims to help engineering leaders consider issues before starting a software reliability team. Since I am an advocate for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we will now refer to such a team as the “SRE team”. Besides creating a new team, leaders face many responsibilities that are often invisible to individual contributors and their…
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Renaming “post-mortems” of software outages for psychological safety
As a generative leader and mental health advocate, I am wary of seeing such a morbid term being thrown around for what should be a learning experience that advances culture. This post will differ from my usual positive posts about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Please bear with this because I’m an otherwise forward thinker. Two…
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Why Agile software teams need SRE support
Agile software delivery is de rigeur of modern software. However, as complexity increases, there’s a high risk of frequent, high-velocity breaking software-in-production. Software-in-production is when the software is accessible by users. That’s where Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) can come to support the Agile software team’s efforts. Who are Site Reliability Engineers? Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)…
