If you are thinking about moving to a DevOps methodology or looking to improve your current DevOps operations, you might consider Site Reliability Engineering.
Transforming a traditional software development methodology to DevOps can be a complicated path. Not only are you making a dramatic change in the way your teams develop and deploy software, you are also changing the entire culture of business operations. If you don't spend a lot of time planning this move, things can go wrong.
Or maybe you've already implemented DevOps and are finding that it's not going as well as you thought. Your teams aren't collaborating, automation isn't working, and deadlines are being missed.
So much can happen when there are so many moving parts.
Fortunately, there are ways to make positive changes to your DevOps methods that can not only alleviate the overwhelming stress that can come with such a dramatic change, but also help make DevOps much more effective.
One option that can positively affect DevOps is to implement Site Reliability Engineering. It may seem like an exaggeration, but bear with us and you will see how this can apply.
What is site reliability engineering?
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a set of principles that applies various aspects of software engineering to traditional IT operations. SRE aims to create reliable and scalable software systems, and while it's not a 1:1 comparison to DevOps, many of the principles apply.
With SRE, there are 7 guiding pillars, each of which can be applied directly to DevOps for a greatly improved workflow.
Embracing the risk
No service is 100% guaranteed and almost all customers and clients understand this. Simply put, risk is inherent to software development and business in general. When a company avoids risk, it also avoids the rewards that accompany the risk. By embracing risk, you greatly increase the chances that your developers and IT operations can create something that will far outperform or outsell what you have previously deployed or released.
When it comes to DevOps, the risk is implicit, and if you refuse to embrace it, you will find that DevOps is much more challenging than it should be. When you (and your teams) expose yourself to risk, you will find that the DevOps methodology is not only easier to employ, but also easier to grow and improve. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you apply this principle to DevOps, it is imperative that your teams also understand that along with risk, there is also safety and security, and they will not be punished when risk goes wrong.
Service Level Objectives
It's important to have goals. But with SRE, it's also crucial to employ what we call Service Level Objectives (SLO). SLOs are directly linked to customer satisfaction and should be an important key for any business. When you consider customer satisfaction and apply it to your goals, it can radically change the way you do things.
Remember that the customer is a central component of your business and without them you would struggle to survive. The old saying “the customer is always right” can now be seen more along the lines of “customer satisfaction drives innovation”.
You should always be thinking about how you can improve customer satisfaction, and this applies directly to DevOps because DevOps should already be a key component to growing your business to serve the customer. You want to be able to scale to meet demand, implement features to improve the customer experience, and be able to resolve issues that directly impact customers quickly.
Eliminating Work
This principle should be pretty obvious as to how it applies to DevOps. Eliminating work means eliminating repetitive work that can bog down teams. When your engineers have to deal with simple, repetitive tasks, they are prevented from doing what's really important: focusing on development and operations.
DevOps is perfectly poised to eliminate drudgery with the addition of automation. With automation eliminating these repetitive tasks, DevOps should run more smoothly. Your engineers will then be able to not only keep everything running as expected, but also develop new features for software and even improve the software development lifecycle that helps drive your company forward.
Monitoring
If you're not closely monitoring your DevOps workflow, you're missing out on important insights into how everything works and how things could be improved. DevOps monitoring (with a nod to SRE) involves carefully viewing the data your systems produce and making important decisions based on that information.
The information you collect can not only help improve your entire DevOps workflow, but it can also go a long way toward saving your company money and even making everyone's job considerably easier.
The four most important pieces of information you want to monitor are latency, traffic patterns, errors, and service saturation.
This principle goes straight to the heart of DevOps.
Release Engineering
This is another principle that should be obvious in how it is applied to DevOps. Release engineering is about deploying software in a consistent, stable, and repeatable way.
Straight to the point, release engineering must take these elements into account:
- Configuration management – developing a standard by which versions are configured.
- Process documentation – creating documentation for each version.
- Automation – the automation of routine and repeatable tasks.
- Rapid Deployment – Iterate quickly and frequently rather than using the traditional software deployment method.
- Tests – must be continuous and reliable.
Automation
Another absolutely fundamental principle for DevOps is automation. In the world of DevOps, there are many areas where automation can be employed, from builds to releases.
As automation makes your DevOps workflow more reliable, it also eliminates many routine tasks that are traditionally assigned to developers and IT operations. The more these tasks can be automated, the more positively they will affect your DevOps methodology.
Simplicity
Although DevOps is a very complicated and challenging method of deploying software, any chance you get to simplify things will help improve the entire workflow.
Instead of designing and developing overly complex systems, you should put simplicity at the center of everything. Remember this: When complex systems break, fixes are almost as complicated. On the contrary, when a simple system breaks, the fix is usually quick and easy.
If you can reimagine your DevOps workflow with simplicity in mind, you should do it. This doesn't mean you have to simplify everything to the point where you can't achieve your goals. What this means, however, is that you design and develop with intention and purpose. If you find that some component of your DevOps workflow is overly complex, task your teams with simplifying that piece so that if it breaks, the fix is obvious and quick.
Conclusion
DevOps and website reliability engineering can go hand in hand. While these two ideas may be seen as applicable to very different aspects of your business, the truth is that they are much closer than you think.
Follow the 7 principles of SRE with your DevOps methodology and you will see that things will go much more smoothly than you can imagine.
If you liked this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
- How to accelerate software development by adopting the DevOps culture
- The wave of MLOps (machine learning and Devops)
- The 7 Best Continuous Integration Tools for 2023
- Understanding the DevOps Hype
- What is DevSecOps and why do you need it?
