Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an increasingly critical discipline in the modern DevOps landscape. Originated at Google in 2003, this methodology proposes treating operations as software problems. According to a recent article published by IBM, there are seven fundamental principles that guide teams toward operational success.

Below, we break down these key principles based on the original source from IBM Think Insights.

1. Risk Acceptance

Counterintuitively, the goal of SRE is not to achieve 100% reliability, as this is often costly and hinders innovation. The principle is based on managing risk as a continuum, using “error budgets” to balance stability with the speed of delivering new features.

2. Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

Establishing quantifiable goals is vital. An SLO defines the expected level of quality (such as latency or availability). These objectives are measured through Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and help prioritize engineering work over reactive tasks.

3. Elimination of Toil

“Toil” is defined as those manual, repetitive tasks that do not add long-term value but grow linearly with the service. SRE seeks to automate these tasks to free up engineers’ cognitive time for higher-value projects.

4. Monitoring

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Effective monitoring focuses on the “four golden signals”: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. The goal is to analyze system performance in real-time and alert on issues before they severely impact users.

5. Automation

Automation is the engine that enables scalability. By automating processes such as account creation or bug detection, consistency is guaranteed, human error is reduced, and exponential workloads can be managed without increasing staff at the same rate.

6. Release Engineering

This principle integrates the release process from the start. Priority is given to fast and frequent releases, hermetic builds, and deployment automation to ensure that changes are safe and reversible if necessary.

7. Simplicity

Complexity is the enemy of reliability. SRE advocates for maintaining simple systems: removing unnecessary features, avoiding over-engineering in APIs, and making small, incremental changes to facilitate debugging.

Source: To dive deeper into these concepts, you can check the original article at IBM Think Insights.