Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20. SRE in Diverse Environments

By Derek Remund, Ian Schlesinger, Joanna W., and Yuri Grinshteyn

With Carmela Quinito

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The SRE approach pioneered at Google—which applies software engineering to production problems—has proven to be sufficiently effective as to attract interest from organizations in many industries. We start this chapter by exploring a common situation: what if you’re the first SRE at a small company or considering hiring one? Where do you start? How do you improve or maintain service reliability without succumbing entirely to operational work and toil?

We then address organizations that struggle to replicate or adapt the SRE model due to technical, organizational, or process constraints. After outlining these common challenges, we suggest approaches to improve reliability practices under such conditions.

To make these scenarios more concrete, we turn to real world examples of applying SRE in various environments: a rapidly-scaling B2B startup, a multinational bank, ...