Doing SRE the right way

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an expensive proposition for small and large organizations alike. You can mitigate the costs by:

Setting up the right organizational structure for SRE
Hiring for the right team composition
Building the SRE culture

Piyush Verma, co-founder of Last9 Inc shares practical insights and wisdom, from accumulated successful and not-so-successful experiences.

Transcript

1. Grooming Organizational structures, teams,
   capacity and culture
   Piyush Verma
   @realmeson10
   Doing SRE the
   Right Way ⅓
   

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2. 1. What is SRE?
   2. Vs DevOps?
   3. How much does reliability cost?
   4. How long before I am reliable?
   5. Isn’t it too early to automate?
   6. What does an SRE code?
   7. Is Reliability achieved before/after release?
   8. What is the right SRE organization structure?
   .. .. .. .. ask in comments
   FAQs
   

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3. Failure Cycle of Physical Products
   

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4. Failure Cycle of Software Products
   

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5. Feature Upgrade vs Stability
   

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6. Some approaches to
   build reliability
   ● Ignorance
   ● Throw more engineers at the problem
   ● Recovery Blocks
   ● NVersion Programming
   

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7. Instead, what we
   need is...
   Self-checking software
   [Michael Lyu]
   Observability
   Comprehensive metrics
   And, Control
   Policies that adhere to Production
   

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8. Software Operations
   should be treated
   … Like a Product
   

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9. Software Products vs Software Operations?
   Product
   • Product Manager
   • Customer feedback
   • Product metrics
   • Google analytics
   • Conversion funnels
   Operations
   • One failure at a time
   • Ad-hoc increments
   • On-call softwares
   • Re-write
   • Kubernetes
   • Data driven decisions
   • Prioritize your failures
   • Put a value to the loss
   

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10. What do you see?
    

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11. Viewing from a SRE lens:
    ● 35% have not scaled *enough* yet.
    ● 50% have to wait before they scale
    ● 25% are paying a person to do this
    ● 35% are about to hit this problem at
    some point
    

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12. Data We Gather (1
    

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13. Data We Produce (2
    

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14. Site Reliability
    Engineering
    Where do we start?
    

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15. Reliability (Quality → Metric)
    

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16. Robust vs Reliable
    - Should be up?
    - Should be up AND not serve errors?
    - Should be up AND not serve errors AND serve correct data?
    - Should be up AND not serve errors AND serve correct data AND
    within no time?
    - Should be up AND not serve errors AND serve correct data AND
    within no time AND serve unlimited TPS?
    - Should be up AND not serve errors AND serve correct data AND
    within no time AND serve unlimited TPS AND concurrently?
    

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17. Reliability is not a
    buffet lunch.
    

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18. There is no bug-free
    software
    There is no 100%
    reliable software
    

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19. Step 1 Service Level Indicators
    

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20. Step2
    Service Level Objectives
    

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21. Service Level Objectives
    Reliability
    Release
    Velocity
    

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22. How to set SLOs
    • Measurable
    • Customer-oriented
    • Challenging
    • Unambiguous
    • All Stakeholders participate
    

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23. How to set SLOs
    - Should be up through the day. Downtime allowed 3  315 AM
    - Only 1% requests should have status code  4xx
    - Only 0.05% of /deep-health POST  GET can mismatch
    - Only 1% requests should be slower than 100ms
    - Numbers should hold upto 100 TPs
    - Numbers should hold upto 10 concurrent requests
    

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24. SLOs detailed
    A SLO of 99% of a service with 1 million requests in a month; allows for
    10000 failures.
    If current failure counter == 9000 and there is still a fortnight left; All
    hands, towards stability.
    If current failure counter == 500, release as often as you want.
    

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25. SLOs detailed
    • Choosing a time window
    • Choosing aggregations
    • Window lengths
    

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26. You can only do so
    much, manually.
    Enter Site Reliability Engineering.
    

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27. So what does a SRE do?
    • When an outage happens, minimize the downtime
    • Where else is this happening?
    • Prevent repetition
    

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28. The SRE Recipe
    • Observability - 2 tbsp
    • Control - 2 tbsp
    • Automation - 1 tbsp
    • Root Cause Analysis - 3 tbsp
    • Cross-org collaboration - 3 tbsp
    • Guard Rails/Frameworks - 4 tbsp
    

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29. Isn’t K8s and cloud already automated?
    • If a human does a thing 3x over
    • 3 different results
    • 3 different bugs
    • 1 highly demotivated employee
    

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30. When/Do I need that
    much automation?
    Servers can scale, people
    cannot.
    

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31. Right time to focus on SRE?
    when($ spend < $ lost)
    

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32. December 1, 1913
    12 hours → 150 minutes
    

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33. But that’s exactly how they sold DevOps!
    DevOps is the goal.
    SRE is a way to get there.
    Functional Programming: Software Development :: SRE : DevOps
    

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34. So, what did SRE change?
    • Feature development is owned by Product Developers
    • Quality is owned by QA / Release Managers
    • Who owned the Uptime?
    • Especially when choosing between Stability vs Feature Release
    • Uptime didn’t have owners
    • Who owns Capacity Plan and spend?
    • More felt over the last 2 decades
    • Shops remain open 247
    • Consumption is 247
    

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35. SRE brings to software development
    what assembly line brought to
    manufacturing.
    Over 60% failures were bad deployments and 38% issues were
    repeated.
    SRE practice helped cut down operations cost by 60% within a year.
    

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36. Reliability is not a
    buffet lunch.
    Go A-la-carte
    

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37. Tiered SRE approach
    Sporadic work, no dedicated SRE staffing (Tier 0
    Put observability in place
    Projects, some dedicated SRE time (Tier 1
    Aim to unify dataset across services to build common improvements.
    Onboard one service and on-call time (Tier 2
    Setup on-call and escalation matrix. See how teams and services adopt
    Onboard other services. Reuse SRE tooling and practices (Tier 3
    Go org-wide
    

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38. SRE team structures
    1SRE Common
    Tooling
    Embedded
    Outsourced
    

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39. SRE Maturity Model
    9x
    Beginner
    ● Canary/Rolling
    ● Coverage
    Validations
    ● SLI Collection
    ● On-Call
    ● Runbooks
    Fault Tolerance
    ● 9x +
    ● Tolerance Proof
    ● SLO
    ● Disaster
    Recovery
    ● Rollback
    99
    Automated
    ● 99 +
    ● Chaos Engg
    ● Capacity Plans
    ● Pattern based
    re-architect.
    99.9
    Automatic
    ● 99.9 +
    ● Failure Mode
    effect analysis
    ● Cost Analysis
    ● If this then That
    ● Auto Healing
    99.99
    

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40. Key Skills of an SRE
    ● Withstand Boredom
    ● Attention towards detail
    ● *nix
    ● Programming
    ● Shell scripting
    ● On-call experience (real or assisted)
    ● Statistics
    

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41. These skills will rob my
    bank.
    Not an SRE
    

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42. How do you train SREs
    Based on organizational size and maturity
    • Train on Job
    • Self-Learn
    • Throw them in the Ocean
    SRE
    

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43. ● There is a cost to reliability
    ● 100% reliability is a myth
    ● Reliability can (and should) be achieved incrementally
    ● Reliability is improved in Dev sprints
    ● Reliability needs participation from every stakeholder
    ● Reliability is a function. Someone happened to call it SRE.
    Things to take away
    

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44. Thank you
    piyush@last9.io
    @realmeson10
    last9.io
    

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