Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation

Explores the discipline of applying software engineering practices to infrastructure and operations problems to build scalable, reliable software services.

What we cover

• Module 1: SRE Principles & Practices Origins of SRE: Google’s operational paradigm and foundational literature. SRE vs. DevOps: SRE as a concrete implementation of DevOps pillars (silo reduction, accepting failure, gradual change, tooling/automation, and measurement). Core Principles: Treating operations as a software problem, managing to Service Levels, eliminating toil, automating repetitive work, reducing the cost of failure, and fostering shared ownership between Dev and Ops.
• Module 2: Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Error Budgets Service Level Terminology: Distinguishing between SLAs (contractual), SLOs (operational targets), and SLIs (quantitative metrics). The Error Budget Concept: Balancing release velocity with service stability; why 100% reliability is the wrong target. Error Budget Policies: Defining actions when budgets are exhausted (e.g., deployment freezes, prioritizing stability backlogs). The VALET Framework: Setting SLO dimensions across Volume, Availability, Latency, Errors, and Tickets.
• Module 3: Reducing Toil Defining Toil: Work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly with service size. The Cost of Toil: Individual burnout, career stagnation, delivery bottlenecks, and "Engineering Bankruptcy". The 50% Rule: Capping operational toil at 50% of an engineer's time to preserve capacity for engineering projects. Toil Elimination Strategies: Internal and external automation, self-service portals, and service enhancements.
• Module 4: Monitoring & Service Level Indicators (SLIs) Defining SLIs: Calculating success ratios (Good EventsTotal Events) across relevant time windows. Monitoring vs. Observability: Active health checks (monitoring) vs. inferring internal system states from external outputs (observability). Telemetry Pillars: Distributed tracing, structured event logging, metric collection, and application instrumentation. Modern Tooling Stack: Prometheus, Grafana, Logstash, Splunk, and Catchpoint.
• Module 5: SRE Tools & Automation Automation as a Force Multiplier: Consistency, speed, and time savings. SRE-Led Service Automation: Shifting operations left into CI/CD pipelines; Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and Configuration as Code (Ansible, Puppet, Docker). Production Validation: In-production functional/non-functional testing, versioned and signed artifacts (Nexus, Artifactory), and multi-criteria alerting. Automated Scalability & Resiliency: Auto-scaling groups, Kubernetes orchestration, and runtime self-protection. Automation Maturity Hierarchy: Progressing from manual intervention to self-healing platforms.
• Module 6: Anti-Fragility & Learning from Failure Failure Paradigms: Treating failure as an opportunity to build resilience. Core Reliability Metrics: MTTD (Mean Time to Detect), MTTR (Mean Time to Recover), MTRS (Mean Time to Restore Service), and RPO (Recovery Point Objective). Organizational Culture: The Westrum Organizational Typology (Pathological vs. Bureaucratic vs. Generative cultures). Resilience Engineering: Conducting operational fire drills, implementing Chaos Engineering (e.g., Netflix Simian Army, Chaos Monkey), and minimizing outage blast radiuses.
• Module 7: Organizational Impact of SRE Business Drivers: Protecting revenue, preserving brand reputation, and managing scale. SRE Team Topologies: Consulting, Embedded, Platform, and Sliced team models. Sustainable Operations: Sustainable on-call rotations, the 25% on-call rule, and automating incident management. Blameless Post-Mortems: Defining post-mortem triggers, timeline reconstruction, root cause analysis without blame, and actionable remediation items.
• Module 8: SRE, Other Frameworks, and Emerging Trends Framework Coexistence: Integrating SRE with Agile, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and ITIL 4 Service Management. Emerging Reliability Specializations: Network Reliability Engineering (NRE) Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) Heritage Reliability Engineering (HRE) for legacy systems The Future of Observability: Consolidating APM, metrics, and logs into unified observability platforms.

Every session is customized to your organization's needs. The final agenda is confirmed with your facilitator before delivery.