Enterprise DevOps and SRE
Part of the change-maker series
Implementation Best Practices At Scale
Traditional IT operations isn’t able to work at the speed of modern, cloud-native software delivery. It is why methodologies such as Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, are gaining traction across the industry.
By combining SRE models with a Scaled DevOps framework, teams can efficiently leverage the benefits of both of these methodologies.
In this article, we’ll explore how DevOps and SRE fit together to enable scalability and operationalisation. We’ll also look at the ways large enterprises can take advantage of both these approaches to drive technology and business benefits.
What is DevOps and SRE?
A company’s ability to adapt and transform to better leverage new technologies, address customer needs quickly and do so efficiently is essential to ensuring its success; DevOps and SRE provide that capability to an organisation.
DevOps is a way of working that leverages automation to combine tasks and activities which would conventionally be siloed across separate functional areas, like Development, Operations, Testing, and Security. It enables an organisation to transition to a more engineering-focused approach that takes a concept from ideation through to production reliably, repeatability, and securely. DevOps allows businesses to focus less on repetitive tasks and more on the value-adding aspects of delivery.
SRE on the other hand, uses software engineering methods to guarantee the stability and availability of operations while allowing teams to simultaneously add new features and make operational improvements as necessary through automation.
How Does SRE and DevOps Fit Together?
SRE is an implementation of DevOps, although the two are often mistakenly considered as two different approaches to product development and IT operations. In practice, they share the same fundamental principles and objective of empowering the business to become agile.
Although SRE didn’t emerge from DevOps, it is aligned with DevOps. Both approaches work to close the gap between development and operations teams to improve the release cycle, achieve better product reliability, and provide services faster.
The 5 key pillars of success which align DevOps and SRE principles are:
- Reduce organisational siloes and build cross capability teams
- Failure is acceptable, the key is to fail fast and early on in the process and use it as an opportunity to improve.
- Implement changes in gradual steps to deliver value as fast as possible and allow for easier adoption.
- Leverage tooling and automation so you can spend valuable time innovating or optimising.
- Measure everything, data is key to this approach. Every instance of infrastructure, pipelines, integrations, security, process, etc. and act on the data to remediate or improve.
Best Practices for Scaled DevOps and SRE in Enterprise
Broadly speaking, DevOps outlines “what” you have to do to consolidate development and operations. Whereas, SRE outlines “how” you do it. Below are some of the best practices when implementing Scaled DevOps and SRE in large enterprises:
- Treat operations as a software problem and adopt solutions that perform IT operations automatically. i.e. automate the response to operations issues/incidents so that they are automatically detected and resolved.
- Focus on more value creating activities by automating repetitive tasks.
- Utilise Containers and Microservices which facilitate system scalability.
- Use platforms that allow for metrics-based continuous monitoring of network and application performance across cloud environments.
- Automate testing in production and leverage synthetics to ensure system functionality and connectivity operates as expected.
Business Benefits of SRE
SRE can help create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and track service health through to costs of downtime or lost productivity. SRE allows organisations to:
- Create observability into service health
SRE teams have the most detailed understanding of how everything in the organisation’s technology ecosystem is connected. As a result, they know how to track metrics, logs, and traces across disparate services and present a holistic picture of system health. In case of an incident, this observability helps on-call responders to quickly find the needed context.
- Close the gap between developers and operations
SRE bridges the gap between developers and sysadmins. It helps find ways to enhance automation and communication that benefit both teams. SRE can help DevOps teams uncover areas for improvement in the release pipeline. Plus, it encourages everyone to be more accountable by creating rules related to on-call availability and incident response.
- Move toward a modern network operations centre (NOC)
SRE employs automation, machine learning, and an in-depth understanding of system operations to shift to a modern NOC where alerts go straight to the person responsible for fixing the related issue.
- Organise on-call structures and alerting workflows
SRE teams have expertise to identify/resolve and proactively address issues. An alerts system can usually be optimised to identify and trigger automated resolution to a problem, or trigger an on-call process established by the teams. When it comes to incident management, SRE teams utilise an objective approach to on-call schedules and alerting workflows/rules.
- Drive resilience proactively
SREs proactively identify areas for improvement and give people the autonomy to implement solutions. SREs help developers and operations teams find the right balance between reliability and speed, with the ability to develop self-healing systems through automation for known issues.
Business Benefits of Scaled DevOps
DevOps enables an increase in velocity and efficiency across the SDLC as well as reducing expenditure. Scaled DevOps allows organisations to:
- Increase Rate of Delivery
DevOps shorter development cycles and more frequent release cycles. This ability to develop, test, and release faster means your team can react quickly to customer feedback.
- Deliver Cultural Benefits
DevOps brings a big cultural shift that not only eliminates communication barriers but also allows teams to easily work together and share resources.
- Reduce Time-to-Resolution
DevOps practices are especially suitable for minimising the impact of bottlenecks, rollbacks, and deployment failures on overall productivity. In the event of defects, less time is required for recovery.
- Increase Process Efficiencies
With automation at its core, a DevOps environment can handle the fast development of the product, fluctuating workloads, and altering requirements over time.
- Minimise Risks
DevOps enables teams to quickly deploy new software while also protecting production instances, improving on the flexibility and reliability of your solutions.
- Realise Cost Efficiencies
DevOps practices not only drive innovation which grows business value but also reduces overheads of maintenance and upgrades by removing redundant capital spending, reducing delivery complexity and mitigating budget overruns.
How Can Tyme Help?
Our consultants work with you to establish and maintain operational flexibility across platforms within the organisation through automated processes and in-system playbooks. You can minimise disruption to customer experiences through the implementation of robust procedures for the seamless handling of incidents and black-outs. We enable automation from Development to Operations through the shifting left of security, data, quality, governance, and visibility.
To learn more about how we can help you implement SRE and Scaled DevOps, get in touch today.
