SRE-AS-A-SERVICE ON KUBERNETES

WHAT IS SRE?

SRE is a practice that brings together the worlds of software engineering and IT operations. By leveraging SRE principles, organizations gain several advantages, such as improved observability into service health to understand their performance better, improved collaboration between developers and ops personnel to reach goals faster, and increased automation capabilities with associated time-to-market benefits from greater transparency & visibility. Ultimately this makes operations an integral part of value creation while increasing reliability throughout a business’s services & systems.

WHAT ARE THE TOP 9 SRE BEST PRACTICES?

SRE implementation is challenging for companies since it necessitates a fundamental change in how software and applications are built and delivered to their users. It may take some time to work on the best practices that the company has chosen to implement the SRE plan and tailor it to meet operational needs. There are various tried-and-true methods for expediting the procedure, such as;

1. Analyzing the changes holistically:

   In examining challenges and solutions, Site Reliability Engineering takes a thorough approach. It enables the team to evaluate all instances to determine the source of the change and its influence on other systems and procedures. In addition, this method will assist the team in understanding any dependencies that bring about the difference and how they can chain throughout the process. Finally, the team will benefit from SRE’s comprehensive approach in analyzing short-term and long-term implications.

2. Expand the skill sets:

   Implementing an SRE strategy inside a process necessitates using highly and diversely experienced engineers and architects. Because the product’s environment and operations are dynamic, engineers who can constantly use their skill sets and knowledge to satisfy the requirements will be required. Encouraging training and professional development programs may aid in the transformation of a regular team into an expert SRE team.
   

3. Learn from failures:
   

   SRE emphasizes continuous improvement and requires teams to view mistakes as learning opportunities. Instead of worrying about mistakes, SRE delivers insights that will assist the team in communicating the issues. They will not only be able to identify the problems, but they will also be able to identify the areas where they need to enhance their skills. Learning from failures using SRE closes the gaps that must be addressed to improve overall performance and reliability.

4. Try to eliminate manual tasks:
   

   Doing everything possible to remove duplication is one of the top SRE principles. SRE emphasizes automation from the start, laying the groundwork for future automation. SRE pushes the team to undertake more work up front, which saves them time and effort afterward. This allows for eliminating as much unnecessary or duplicate labor as possible.

5. Automate everything:

   Quick delivery is one of the most significant needs for a business, and accuracy is as vital. Most companies strive to keep their systems trustworthy while minimizing the impact on numerous processes. It would be best if you were required to discontinue time-consuming, repetitive tasks that squander time. Companies have to use their time to automate operations rather than waste it on repetitive manual labor.

6. Defining SLOs like an end user:
   

   To maintain the high reliability and availability of software services, it is critical to identify and assess what consumers require. Businesses must consider the user’s perspective while developing SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Establishing SLO can assist in gaining a better understanding of the end-user and helps in improving systems or applications for better services and increased uptime. It will also aid in focusing on client-side request latency rather than service-side latency. For example, Google began analyzing Gmail latency and error rates on the client side rather than the server, as they had previously. As a result, the error rate and latency were calculated very differently. To address the concerns, code modifications were implemented. And the results indicated that Gmail’s availability rate went from 99% to 99.9% in a few years.

7. Forward and pragmatic thinking:
   

   Silos provide little value to the SRE culture, and a siloed approach ignores how a process affects others in the system. Because the primary goal of SRE is to eliminate silos, a proper SRE practice should be used to determine how it would affect the team. While solving an issue, consider how the answer may affect others in the future.

8. Monitoring errors and availability:
   

   SRE teams must monitor their systems to discover performance issues and maintain service availability. Monitoring is essential to ensure that an application or system behaves as planned. This includes providing a service, accomplishing specific objectives, and knowing what occurs when a change is made. Furthermore, we want to know ahead of time.

9. Toil management:
   

   Automation is one of the primary focuses of SRE. Toil is a waste of valuable engineering time, and by SREs developing frameworks, procedures, and internal tooling/building tools to reduce it, engineers can focus on inventing.

WHAT ARE THE TOP TOOLS USED IN SRE?

The SRE architecture varies depending on the business ecosystem, but teams rely primarily on automation and software technologies to optimize IT service delivery. With many available alternatives, selecting the right tools for your business may be complex. The following is a list of tools commonly used by SRE teams.

• Grafana
  Grafana is a free and open-source visualization and analytics tool for time series data. The software assists you in integrating diverse data pools and seeing the unified data on a single dashboard. Dashboards may be organized into folders and assigned permissions based on their significance and criticality.
• Kibana
  Kibana is an open-source data visualization platform that SRE teams can use as part of SecOps to monitor operational metrics and identify security incidents. It is most typically used to gather metrics from Elasticsearch clusters, but it may also be used for other monitoring tasks.
  
• Datadog
  Datadog is a cloud application monitoring tool. The platform combines data from servers, databases, containers, and third-party services to make the complete IT infrastructure stack visible. In addition, the platform aids in the tracking of performance indicators and the monitoring of events for IT infrastructure, including cloud services.
• Ansible
  A simplified configuration management and application deployment tool that aids in implementing infrastructure as code (IaC) architecture.
• Slack
  Salesforce now offers Slack, a popular real-time communication tool. It serves as a leading tool for business and team cooperation. Slack may be used by SRE teams for both interpersonal chats and as a programmatic tool to assist in automating responses and organizing activities. Slack may also connect to other systems, such as ChatOps services.
• Prometheus
  Prometheus is a service monitoring solution that is a free source. It was created by SoundCloud developers and was later approved by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a second project after Kubernetes. The Prometheus monitoring system features a multidimensional data model and PromQL, a robust query language. The system collects metrics from configured targets at predetermined intervals, analyzes them, and shows the results.
• Terraform
  HashiCorp’s Terraform employs an infrastructure as code (IaC) methodology, allowing you to create infrastructure declaratively using simple text files. Terraform automatically provisioned infrastructure such as virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and apps based on these declarative templates, either on-premises or in public cloud settings.

CLOUD CONTROL SOLUTIONS’ SIGNATURE SRE-AS-A-SERVICE

Our SRE-as-a-Service on Kubernetes could be the secret to unlocking your company’s full potential. Here are ten must-knows that’ll help get you there!

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