Training Site Reliability Engineers

Chapter 5. How to “SRE” an SRE Training Program

In this chapter, we discuss how you can apply the SRE principles, practices, and culture, which you are likely covering in your SRE education program, to your training program itself, to deliver efficient program operations. Program operations cover things like logistics, reporting, and material curation. Let’s discuss in detail how to “SRE” an SRE training program.

Applying SRE Principles to Your Training

Teaching SRE best practices means that you need to set an example—live by the rules you set.

“SRE’ing” your SRE Training Program

In Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, the Service Reliability Hierarchy is used to describe the health of a production service. In a similar way, the health and maturity of an SRE training program can also be framed in the context of the SRE Training Reliability Hierarchy (see Figure 5-1).

Figure 5-1. SRE Training Reliability Hierarchy

Although the Service Reliability Hierarchy is usually discussed in a bottom-up fashion, important insights and understanding can be had by looking top-down. Starting with “Product” at the pinnacle, the product needs the development process in order to exist. The development process needs a testing and release process to ensure that the product works, is fit for a purpose, and can be deployed to production. Testing needs postmortems and ...