Growing a Successful SRE Practice – A 7-Step Guide

The growing demand for digital products with new features means businesses often prioritize delivery over reliability. While products hit the market quicker, they might not function as intended in the long term.

That results in poor user experiences that can jeopardize the reputation of development companies. In addition to these issues, infrastructure, and operations (I&O) leaders struggle to manage complex systems, which can further impact reliability for end users.

One effective solution is integrating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) into product development. Contrary to common misconceptions, SRE practices do not require an influx of new engineers and developers; they can be integrated into existing workflows with strategic planning. Here’s a guide to help I&O leaders begin and grow an SRE practice using seven streamlined steps from a recent Gartner report.

Building & Growing SRE practice in 7 steps

Gartner’s seven-step approach divides the SRE process into three stages: adopting SRE principles, launching your SRE practice, and evolving the practice for continued improvement.

1. Communicate the vision

The first step is to communicate your organization’s vision for SRE. Share the principles, objectives, scaling plans, and metrics that will guide your SRE journey. Establish clear service-level objectives (SLOs) to define reliability benchmarks and prioritize customer experience. Explain how SRE practices will complement existing workflows and enhance reliability and continuous improvement.

2. Build a dedicated SRE team

Successful SRE implementation relies on a team with diverse technical skills and a collaborative mindset. An effective SRE team should focus on reliability and automation while supporting other departments, such as operations. Members should possess a mix of knowledge in cloud-native technologies, chaos engineering, systems engineering, and software development.

3. Define your SRE practice goals

Instead of following a rigid standard, tailor your SRE practice to meet specific organizational objectives, much like DevOps. While SRE may seem highly technical, it requires process and culture shifts across various departments, including collaboration with key stakeholders and customers. Your practice should focus on improving reliability, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

4. Select an application to start and iterate

Choosing the right application is key to gaining initial value from your SRE practice. Gartner recommends starting with a customer-facing app that balances acceptable risk with measurable reliability outcomes. This approach helps you validate SRE benefits without high-stakes risks. Avoid complex commercial software systems with extensive dependencies, as these may complicate early efforts.

5. Evolve your SRE practice

As you launch your SRE practice, continue refining operations for enhanced stability and reliability. Focus on system stability, customer experience, and streamlining other toolchains.

Here are the seven prioritized suggestions for SRE evolution based on Gartner:

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• Availability: Define and manage SLOs and service-level indicators (SLIs) for improved service availability.
• Policies and Governance: Set error budgets aligned with service-level agreements (SLAs) to guide reliability targets.
• Monitoring and Observability: Use data-driven tools for monitoring, observability, and alerting to identify root causes of system issues like latency or data silos.
• Automated Incident Response: Automate incident response to handle outages, natural disasters, and security threats effectively.
• Incident Resolution: Automate emergency responses, self-healing, and AIOps for rapid incident resolution.
• Root Cause Analysis: Conduct blameless postmortems to learn from incidents and prevent recurrence.
• Continuous Improvements: Regularly optimize operations and implement chaos engineering practices to drive constant improvement.

6. Address skill gaps with focused training

Identify any skill gaps within your SRE team and invest in targeted training. While self-study and online courses can help, Gartner advises focusing on training aligned with your specific technologies and architectures. This approach accelerates skill development and ensures your team is prepared to manage the unique demands of SRE.

7. Recognize success and scale adoption

Recognizing team achievements boosts morale and encourages further adoption of SRE practices across the organization. Consider rewards like gift cards or team recognition events, or have executives acknowledge standout contributions. Celebrating success not only motivates the team but also highlights the value of SRE to the wider organization.

The role of technology in establishing your SRE practice

Implementing these SRE best practices will enhance both software delivery and reliability. However, leveraging the right technology is crucial for embedding SRE principles into daily workflows. Open-source and commercial tools in areas such as observability, analytics, and incident response can enhance your team’s capabilities and streamline operations.

Adservio, as a technology consultancy, can help you select and integrate the optimal tools for your SRE initiatives, accelerating time-to-market and improving reliability. Contact us to learn how our expertise can support your journey to a robust and effective SRE practice.