4 ways to scale your Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice

Digital reliability has become a critical competitive success factor. Every second of downtime leads to lost revenue, tumbling share prices and reputational damage; just ask Southwest Airlines, who suffered an $800 million dollar operational breakdown when their tech systems and processes couldn't keep up with demand during winter storms last December. 

Tech teams are facing an explosion of complexity, managing technologies, tools, environments and infrastructures spanning cloud native, hybrid and on-prem. Throw in a freak weather event, or a sudden surge in demand, and no wonder these fragile systems buckle under the pressure. 

SRE teams accept that, in these complex environments, failure is inevitable. What matters is limiting the impact of those failures, learning from them and adapting so that they don't happen again. 

And it's no surprise that SRE skills are in increasing demand, putting pressure on both skills to deliver and budgets to recruit.

So, here's 4 ways to scale SRE practices:

Implementing these practices, supported by environment-as-code,  can help to scale out yourSRE best practices without drastically increasing headcount. Advanced automation reduces toil, slashes downtime and frees up teams to scale their work. 

1. Continuous monitoring

Use environment-as-code to integrate sensors into your entire tech stack and feed a unified control plane. Never worry about an incident going undetected. Continuous monitoring is essential for enabling auto remediation.

2. Auto remediation

Detecting incidents is only part of the resilience equation - you also need to be able to recover quickly and return your systems to a normal working state without the hands-on involvement of operations or SRE. Auto-remediation enables these self-healing, zero-touch operations.

3. Composability

Capture and codify architecture, best practices, policies, processes and runbooks. Create composable design-time and run-time models in reusable blueprints which can be wrapped into your service catalog for self-service.

4. Reduce TOIL

Automate toil management to eliminate low-value, tactical work and repeatable tasks that can detract from value-adding engineering work. Reducing toil can help teams to focus on meeting their defined service level objectives.

Environment-as-code, powered by Cloudsoft AMP.

Cloudsoft AMP is a platform-based software solution with state-of-the art automation and environment-as-code capabilities. AMP sits above complex tech landscapes, managing applications end-to-end throughout their lifecycles; from configuration and testing to observability, auto-remediation and more.

AMP seamlessly integrates with and complements tools that SREs, architects, and developers already use, enabling advanced orchestration from a single control plane. Using autonomic computing principles, AMP uniquely detects, auto-remediates and 'heals' your environments when business impacting issues occur, whilst reducing toil with automation, allowing teams to focus on higher value activities. The result? Reliability assured, MTTR reduced and service level objectives met.