Enterprise Roadmap to SRE

Chapter 4. SRE Practices

Once you’ve established an SRE team and have a grasp on the principles, it’s time to develop a set of practices. A team’s practices are made out of what its members can do, what they know, what tools they have, and what they’re comfortable doing with all these.

What teams do is initially based on their charter and their environment. Often, it defaults to “everything the dev team is not doing,” which can be dangerous. By focusing a team on a subset of operational duties, they can produce a flywheel of capabilities that build on each other, over time. If they’re just thrown in the deep end with an undefined scope, toil and frustration will certainly result. Another common antipattern is to add SRE work onto an already overburdened team.

What the team knows can be expanded via education, either self-imposed or centrally organized. Teams should be encouraged to hold regular peer education sessions—for example, a weekly hour where any question about production is welcome, from either new or veteran team members. If a question is answerable by someone, a teaching session can result. If nobody knows the answer, it can turn into a collaborative investigation. In our experience, these sessions are highly valuable for everyone on the team. Junior team members learn new things, seniors get a chance to spread their knowledge, and often something new is discovered that nobody knew about. Similarly, Wheel of Misfortunes, or tabletop exercises, in which team members ...