The Site Reliability Workbook

Chapter 18. SRE Engagement Model

By Michael Wildpaner, Gráinne Sheerin, Daniel Rogers, and Surya Prashanth Sanagavarapu (New York Times) with Adrian Hilton and Shylaja Nukala

Chapter 32 in our first SRE book describes technical and procedural approaches that an SRE team can take to analyze and improve the reliability of a service. These strategies include Production Readiness Reviews (PRRs), early engagement, and continuous improvement.

Simply put, SRE principles aim to maximize the engineering velocity of developer teams while keeping products reliable. This two-fold goal is good for the product users and good for the company. But there’s a limit to how much even the best SRE team can accomplish, and the SRE model is less effective when the domain is too large and overly complex. The current microservices movement makes this dynamic even more acute—a small company can easily have more microservices than a single SRE team can handle. Given a large production landscape, and with the knowledge that they can’t cover every service, an SRE team must decide where to focus their attention to achieve the best results. Product development and SRE teams can collaborate to identify the correct point of focus.

This chapter adopts the perspective of an SRE team that’s intending to provide support for a new service. We look at how to engage most effectively with the service, and with the developer and product teams who own it. Although SRE engagement often builds around one or more services, ...