The primary goal of SRE is to establish scalable and reliable network infrastructures that are able to sustain more positive user experiences and customer satisfaction. It’s a highly valuable practice, especially for enterprises that rely on larger networks and heavy code-based tasks with IT teams and admins who must manage countless devices in a growing virtual landscape.
SRE focuses on taking processes or tasks that have traditionally been done either fully manually or with a larger amount of direct oversight and implemented them through engineering teams that use automated tools and solutions to streamline the workflow. To implement it well, there are a number of best practices a company can adhere to.
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- Balancing digital transformation without sacrificing SLOs – As SRE processes are brought into a corporate culture, it will take time to bring about system-wide change. There must be a balance in encouraging this cultural transformation while still delivering on service level objectives on a consistent basis.
- Monitoring via alerts, ticketing, and logging – This involves thorough collecting, processing, aggregating, and displaying of real-time quantitative data, which can include query counts and types, error counts and types, processing times, and server lifetimes.
- Rapid emergency response – Should outages occur, an enterprise must be poised to detect the downtime and have the resources in place to get operations back online as swiftly as possible while also collecting data to prevent future emergencies as much as possible.
- Demand forecasting and capacity planning – This involves using predictive analysis of gathered data to predict customer demand for a particular product or service. Demand forecasting is intended to help a company improve its decision-making based on the estimation of total sales and revenue.