97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 26. Solo SRE: Effecting Large-Scale Change as a Single Individual

Ashley Poole

Boomin

Being a solo SRE in an organization typically comes about through one of two paths: you already have past SRE experience and you’re joining the organization as its first SRE hire, or you’re an engineer within your existing organization and you’ve seen how introducing an SRE culture and practice could improve pain points and ultimately improve your product life cycle.

As a solo SRE, it might seem daunting at first to see a possibly endless list of pain points that need solving. Often this includes recurring production outages, possibly even from a handful of common root causes. Can you really effect that change on the scale needed? Yes!

When deciding what to tackle first, review the most common or most impactful pain points and find a small area where you can make the most impact, given your likely limited available time between fighting fires. Often, some of the biggest wins include lack of observability, unstructured incident management, or inadequate testing and release procedures.

Without observability, how do you determine how your product (that is, service) is performing, its health, or your users’ happiness?! Improving observability could be anything from implementing logging, adding appropriate logging context, adding or configuring monitoring, exposing metrics, or adding request ...