Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition
by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Christof Leng, David Huska, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy
Chapter 6. Organizational Structures for SRE
Site Reliability Engineering is not only a methodology, mindset, or role—fundamentally, it’s an organizational construct. Organizational structures that support this construct are important because:
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Site Reliability Engineers do not exist in isolation. To thrive, they need a team around them, and those teams need to be embedded in a broader organizational context to be sustainable and mature.
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SRE is a specialization that is dedicated to building unique expertise in reliable systems. It is not a set of skills that every software engineer is expected to master at the same level as a full-time SRE. However, it does make sense for every software engineer to have a basic understanding of operations—the DevOps philosophy is complementary to SRE in that regard.1
The design of an SRE organization needs to adapt to the requirements of the broader organizational context. That said, organizations can pick from and build upon a set of organizational building blocks and best practices for tracking maturity and performance to create their own successful SRE function.
In this chapter, we explore the trade-offs of centralized versus decentralized SRE functions, the design and operation of SRE teams, and how to track the maturity of your SRE practice.
Organizational Structures That Support SRE
An SRE team’s practical success ...
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