Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22. SRE in Diverse Environments

By Ana Oprea, Chris Jones, Derek Remund, Hannes Eder, Ian Schlesinger, Joanna Wijntjes, and Yuri Grinshteyn with Carmela Quinito

The SRE approach pioneered at Google—which applies software engineering to production problems—has proven to be sufficiently effective 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 discuss real-world examples of applying SRE in various environments: a rapidly scaling B2B startup, a multinational bank, a large-scale mortgage lender, and Google’s autonomous driving company, Waymo. Finally, a section on security and privacy explores how SRE skills apply in a different context. While earlier sections detail how SREs communicate or divide tasks with separate organizational functions, this section explores a technical convergence where role boundaries naturally blur to defend the production environment.

SRE When Faced with Staffing and Organizational Constraints ...