97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 32. Bootstrapping SRE in Enterprises

Vanessa Yiu

 

Before embarking on bootstrapping SRE in large enterprises, it is essential to understand the key problems your organization needs to solve, and identify areas where SRE will have the most impact. These should be the primary drivers for your business case, and key deliverables on your roadmap. Broadly speaking, larger organizations tend to suffer more from runtime inefficiencies due to scale. Investing in SRE reduces operational overhead (and hence budget) on running production, and a common incentive is increasing developer productivity and cycles spent on driving strategic change.

However, how this problem manifests itself is much more nuanced. For example, services with higher service level maturity likely have well-established operational practices in place already but perhaps more instability due to usage growth (i.e., capacity constraints) and increasing complexity over time compared to newer services. Know that there is no one size fits all when it comes to implementation. Take the time to do research; interview product managers and on-call engineers to understand common challenges and leverage data sets (e.g., problem management database, incident postmortems) where available to confirm trends and remove recency bias.

Once you can articulate a clear business case for SRE, securing sponsorship at the executive level ...