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By 2026, ITSM teams using site reliability engineering (SRE) principles will improve service reliability by 40% compared to 2022. That's according to research from Gartner's "Improve Product Reliability by Applying SRE Principles to Service Operations" report. But how can SRE optimize product resilience and service reliability? Let's examine this topic in more detail below.
First, it's important to define reliability in the context of digital products and services. Reliability means that a product or service functions as intended for a specific amount of time. For example, a piece of software will do what its developers claim it does and provide end users with ongoing value. That improves the customer experience and the reputation of the software development company.
Resilience differs from reliability. It refers to how a new service or product responds and recovers from a specific reliability-related event. That event might be downtime, high latency, problems with load balancing, or another incident that typically requires manual intervention. How you respond to these large-scale events will determine whether resilience impacts reliability.
Here's a great example of the difference between reliability and resiliency:
System reliability means that system will be free from disturbance or abnormalities. The system will operate without failure. System resiliency means after the occurrence of disturbances or abnormalities, the system will regain its normal state without losing its stability.
You can think of reliability as an outcome. Resilience is about how you achieve that outcome by applying SRE principles and automating service recovery processes. This approach improves both the customer experience and operational stability.
In its report, Gartner outlines several ways SRE principles can make digital services more reliable:
SRE can help you balance the risks of service unavailability and the need to innovate and maintain services. Using an error budget, for example, will determine what changes you can make to services before impacting reliability. This proactive risk management approach contributes to both service reliability and product resilience.
Service-level objectives (SLOs) measure the performance of service-level indicators (SLIs) in your organization. That can help you improve or maintain service reliability. By aligning SLOs with business goals and defining clear thresholds for performance, organizations can better manage the trade-offs between reliability and innovation.
Waste or “toil” refers to manual and low-value tasks that slow down product teams. These tasks include managing access requests and creating new user accounts. SRE automates toil, allowing team members to focus on delivering more reliable services. Reducing toil not only boosts productivity but also strengthens both reliability and resilience by minimizing human error.
Monitoring systems in distributed environments can measure the performance of SLOs. That can help you determine whether your services achieve reliability outcomes for end users. Real-time monitoring helps predict potential failures and reduces their impact on both service reliability and product resilience.
Automating tasks improves performance and productivity in your organization. It also reduces costs and leads to better service implementation. Automation tools like Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines are crucial in maintaining both product resilience and operational efficiency.
Gartner says that “reverse engineering focuses on the high velocity of change by utilizing techniques.” These techniques include automating the release process. Effective release management minimizes the risk of deployment failures, contributing to overall product resilience.
Removing unpopular service features might be difficult for your business. However, simplifying how you work and reducing complex processes can improve reliability. Simplicity is key in both SRE principles and optimizing product resilience. By reducing complexity, you also minimize potential points of failure.
Gartner recommends following these SRE principles for six months. That’s six SLO cycles. Doing so will ensure you gather enough evidence to determine whether these practices provide business value. Gartner also suggests reviewing SRE principles to identify how they apply to service operations.
Gartner’s report only talks about the importance of SRE for reliability. However, we can apply the SRE principles listed above to product resilience. SRE principles such as automation, monitoring, and eliminating toil are directly tied to making systems more resilient to unexpected events. SRE teams will help you incorporate these principles into your organization.
Product resilience involves embracing risk. Worst-case scenarios like outages and cyberattacks will happen to services. However, success depends on how you balance the risk of unavailability with maintaining services.
Integrating SLOs into service-level agreements (SLAs) will help you set performance targets for reliability. However, SLOs can also improve product resiliency. You can determine how your team will respond to a reliability-related event and lessen the impact of that event.
For example, creating SLOs for an outage will guide recovery outcomes and ensure services are available again. Well-defined SLOs also serve as the foundation for a robust incident management framework that enhances product resilience.
By eliminating toil in your organization, software developers and engineering teams can focus on creating more resilient products. You can also remove manual tasks that slow down DevOps team members, allowing them to focus on more effective incident response measures.
Monitoring distributed systems lets you identify failure events and their root cause. For example, metrics tools with dashboards predict when failures occur and help you prevent those failures from impacting products. By integrating AIOps into monitoring, SRE teams can preemptively resolve issues and improve both reliability and resilience.
Automation, one of the most critical SRE principles, also benefits product resilience. Automating manual work in the product development lifecycle allows development teams to make digital products more resilient to external threats.
It can also ensure products remain functional if worst-case scenarios happen. For example, automated failover mechanisms can ensure service continuity during outages, a critical factor in product resilience.
Release engineering, a component of software engineering, automates the release process for new products. That might reduce human error, which can result in products being unable to withstand failures.
Making product development more agile can lead to more resilient products. You can remove complicated workflows and optimize product resiliency. You can also incorporate these SRE principles for product resiliency into your organization for six months. Then you can assess whether SRE provides value to your teams.
SRE teams maximize service reliability by embracing risk, implementing SLOs, and automating and simplifying workflows, among other tasks. However, these teams can also improve product resiliency using the same SRE practices.
For even more successful resiliency outcomes, you need to use the right tools and technologies. Observability platforms, for example, provide insights into the state of your systems at any given time. That can improve service availability and help you quickly recover from a reliability-related event.
Adservio can recommend the best technologies based on your use case and help you achieve your business goals. Contact us now to learn more about the best solutions for product resiliency.
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