Becoming SRE

Chapter 15. Fitting SRE into Your Organization

In Chapter 11, we discussed some of the preparations for a successful SRE implementation in an organization. Let’s assume you read that chapter and came to the conclusion, “Yeah, I think this could work.” This chapter will address the question, “Once you know you want SREs in your organization, what contributes to organizational fit?” It will do this by covering some potential integration models, points of engagement, feedback loops, and signs of success.

Pre-role and Pre-team Practices

There will be lots and lots more to discuss in a later chapter about how one might scale up SRE teams from scratch, but I still want us to start thinking about this problem at “SRE 0” (i.e., when the org doesn’t actually have an SRE). I am a very big fan of trying out SRE practices in an organization even before there is an SRE team hired or a single person holding that title. Unlike, say, civil engineering (where you really want a licensed and certified civil engineer engaged before anyone starts doing any civil engineering), there are no such requirements to begin exploring some of the standard SRE practices. All you need is a healthy dash of curiosity about a service or system and some quality time with a whiteboard to begin to define basic SLIs/SLOs for that service. From there, it is a short hop to keeping track of that SLO in your monitoring system and discussing the results in your regular staff meeting.

In my experience, even pilot or proof-of-concept ...