Enterprise Roadmap to SRE

Chapter 2. Why the SRE Approach to Reliability?

Reliability isn’t a new concept. Enterprises have always placed their reliability, quality, or uptime as qualities they strive to improve. So what’s different about SRE? Why is this happening today, what is different about it, and why should it matter to enterprises?

Setting Reliability as a Key Product Differentiator

Why do enterprises want to build SRE teams or otherwise pursue reliability? What are the outcomes they are hoping to achieve? Popular fads come and go (technology, processes), but there needs to be a substantial business value for them to stay. Consider reliability and security. Neither are initially a clear product differentiator, but both are assumed requirements. It is only in the presence of problems coupled with high expectations or reliance on a product that either become more pronounced. For example, years ago, security exploits and hacks were relatively rare, so security was present, but not on the marketing materials of a consumer or business-facing product. Now, as vulnerabilities are more commonplace and front-of-mind, we see security as a product differentiator.

Reliability (or more commonly, availability or uptime) tends to be mentioned mostly in the context of service-level agreements (SLAs) and similar agreements or expectation-setting fine print. However, we feel its presence in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, third-party sites like Downdetector, and the overall trend of moving more of our lives ...