97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 76. The SRE as a Diplomat

Johnny Boursiquot

Salesforce/Heroku

Although there are common through-lines, no two organizations implement the practices of site reliability engineering in the same manner—a fact that is, unfortunately, seldom recognized, much less acknowledged, when rolling out an SRE function for the first time, especially in organizations where teams have traditionally operated with complete autonomy and independence from one another.

For organizations where teams have complete ownership of a service from its development all the way through to its ongoing operational needs, it’s common and necessary for team-specific practices to develop. This total ownership model works well to move business objectives forward in the early part of a system’s life cycle, but it eventually and insidiously morphs to become unaddressed technical debt when maturing teams need to adopt shared reliability practices and tooling.

The drive for maturation that is supported by engineering leaders will, undoubtedly, include the attempt to inculcate standardization as a result of having identified heterogeneity of processes and tooling among teams to be a barrier to the incremental march toward operational excellence as promised by SRE adoption. Although beneficial on the surface, these changes are hard for teams to absorb due to the impact on what they do and how they do it. As long ...