More Related Content
![Site-Reliability-Engineering-v2[6241].pdf](https://cdn.slidesharecdn.com/ss_thumbnails/site-reliability-engineering-v26241-221023035909-82e9559b-thumbnail.jpg?width=640&height=640&fit=bounds)
Similar to Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), We Keep The Lights On 24/7
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), We Keep The Lights On 24/7
- 1. Site Reliability Engineer Keepingthe lights on 24/7 Darrel Chia SRE Lead Oracle Corporation, Singapore #ISSLearningFest
- 2. Darrel Chia Consulting Memberof Technical Staff / SRE Lead Java Management Service Oracle Corporation #ISSLearningFest
- 3.
- 4. Goals of thisSession • Introduction to SRE • What goes into SRE work • What goes into keeping a service up 24/7 #ISSLearningFest
- 5. On Site ReliabilityEngineering • Primary shift in how a product is being delivered to customers driven by a boom of –as-a-service, cloud native offerings • This shift triggers a change in how products are being built and how new roles are required. #ISSLearningFest
- 6. So what exactlyis SRE ? There are a lot of different explanations and definitions, and its really hard to be clear what exactly SRE is Using Software engineering principals and apply it to Infrastructure and Operations to create reliable systems What Software Engineering Principals ? SLOs, Reducing Toil, Release Engineering … #ISSLearningFest
- 7. On Site ReliabilityEngineering As a concept, SRE deals with the engineering approach to several non-functional requirements : Availability, Scalability, Elasticity, Capacity Planning, Monitoring among a few. Practices differ widely: SRE is a very opinionated approach. Different organizations would prioritize differently. SRE is not a one-size-fits-all #ISSLearningFest
- 8.
- 9. What goes intoSRE work And what we need to keep services 24/7 #ISSLearningFest
- 10. Principles of SREwork Most literature will mention the 7 pillars or principles 1. Embrace Risk 2. Use Service Level Objectives 3. Eliminate Toil 4. Monitoring (distributed systems) 5. Automate Automate Automate! 6. Release Engineering 7. Simplicity These 7 principals is what SRE work is based on, and what we leverage on when priority tasks. #ISSLearningFest What drives our tasks
- 11. My SRE team •Our SRE team is embedded into our Service development itself. Our focus is keeping our service alive. The SRE team also works on DevOps/Operational tasks. • Shared infra forms a big part of our complex ecosystem. This frees up a lot of our time needed to maintain these systems to working on service reliability instead. #ISSLearningFest Some background on the Service
- 12. What goes intoSRE work • In this aspect, SRE functions a lot like an DevOps/Ops team. DevOps • Routinely, we deal with • Monthly patching • Change/Release Management • Dealing with Incident tickets (Both internal and customer) • We also deal with • feature development (and supporting new features) • automation • Infrastructure Updates • Region Expansion (and automation) #ISSLearningFest The Routine Work
- 13. Qualities of SRE #ISSLearningFest SREis a multidisciplinary team. We need a wide range of skillsets 1. Development and Coding 2. Operations and Infrastructure • Change Management and Deployments • Capacity Planning 3. Security and Compliance 4. Incident Management SRE also needs to have the ability to see the big picture and influence architectural design decisions. Compone nt Deployme nt Observabili ty Logging Telemetry Alarms Support and Runbooks Availabilit y Security Complian ce
- 14. What enables SREwork And what we need to keep services 24/7 #ISSLearningFest
- 15. Keeping the siteup 24/7 If we want to talk about keeping the service up 24/7, we can condense it into 2 key areas: 1. Make sure they don’t fail (Availability, Redundancy) 2. When it fails, I want to know When and Why (Observability) … and how solve it. Of course, there are really a lot of other things that we need, but this is a good place to start #ISSLearningFest 2 key areas
- 16. Availability • Use aHigh Availability setup to introduce redundancy. • There are also many other non- functional requirements that are tied to this: resiliency, redundancy #ISSLearningFest Users Web UI API Gateway Service Load Balanc er Computes Enabling Availability through Hardware
- 17. Observability When outage occurs,we want to be able to know the current state of the service. Instrumentation is a key part of this. • Observability is a key enabler for SLOs and SLIs #ISSLearningFest Compone nt Telemetr y/Metrics Logs Alarms and Instrumentation
- 18. Measuring Reliability Our metricsfor success – SLAs, SLOs, SLIs #ISSLearningFest
- 19. Quantifying Reliability • Formy team, we don’t have SLAs. We’re a free service. However we do set SLOs. Which are objectives that the SRE wants to hit. • E.g. 99.5% availability • Our SLOs are set against specific operations of the service (CRUDL). #ISSLearningFest Site Availability
- 20. Service Level Objectivesand Indicators • We look at each individual REST services (CRUDL) • Error Rate (reliability) • How long before an asynchronous request is served ? (latency) • Backend processing of an entity needs to complete within 2 minutes • Every REST service will have their own SLOs and SLI, plus a overall compounded one for reporting as well. #ISSLearningFest SLOs and SLIs
- 21. Tracking metrics • Collectingthe information is just part of it. What we what to do with the information is more important. We want alerts, alarms to be actionable ! • From the metrics, we can also pinpoint issues in our components. e.g. spikes in CPU utilization, memory leaks. • Component developers and SRE need to agree on what to metrics to emit. #ISSLearningFest Other takeways
- 22. Conclusion • There aremany aspects and concepts of SRE work the we did not cover here as well. Like error budgets, toil and automation. • Hopefully this give you a glimpse into my world and you have some insights to takeaway. #ISSLearningFest
- 23.
- 24.
- 25. Give Us YourFeedback #ISSLearningFest Day 3 Programme
- 26.
Editor's Notes
- #2 TODO: Log in to PollEverywhere first and initialize the polls. !
- #3 Here’s something I’m trying out… So while I’m out talking about myself, I’d like you guys to participate in a poll SRE is HUGE topic, so I obviously won’t be able cover it in the short time I have, but what I’d like to share with you is a few of the more critical and interesting points drawn from working in an SRE team. Some of this is common information you can find over google, so there are really no surprises there, but, as much as I can, I’d like to put it into context to how my team actually leverages this, as well as a bit of the more practical approaches or how these are being implemented. I’m working as the SRE lead for one of the Oracle Cloud services – the Java Management Service, or JMS for short. It’s a free service that’s available on OCI deals a lot with how Java usage is managed at scale. The service itself is owned by the Java Platform group, The service itself is quite new, we launched about a year ago. The service itself is currently deployed into around 40 regions, both commercial and non-commercial. I’m not doing to talk too much about this, but if you’re curious, you can run a quick search for Java Management Service and find out for yourself. I’m from a development background : Started off doing development work before transiting into DevOps work and then SRE. First Poll: What industry are you from ?
- #4 SRE is HUGE topic, so I obviously won’t be able cover it in the short time I have, but what I’d like to share with you is a few of the more critical and interesting points drawn from working in an SRE team. Some of this is common information you can find over google, so there are really no surprises there, but, as much as I can, I’d like to put it into context to how my team actually leverages this, as well as a bit of the more practical approaches or how these are being implemented. I’m working as the SRE lead for one of the Oracle Cloud services – the Java Management Service, or JMS for short. It’s a free service that’s available on OCI deals a lot with how Java usage is managed at scale. The service itself is owned by the Java Platform group, The service itself is quite new, we launched about a year ago. The service itself is currently deployed into around 40 regions, both commercial and non-commercial. I’m not doing to talk too much about this, but if you’re curious, you can run a quick search for Java Management Service and find out for yourself. I’m from a development background : Started off doing development work before transiting into DevOps work and then SRE.
- #6 It was in the 1990s that we saw one of the first SaaS service offering, and a few years after, we had a huge explosion with media content providers and social media bursting into the scene. There was primary shift in the paradigm on how products were now being delivered to customers. The tail end of the software delivery phases became more important and it got tied directly to revenue. This, of course triggered a change to the fundamental way these products are being built and created new roles that needed to be filled.
- #7 I’m not going to touch too much on these engineering principals. For SRE, most literature will mention they 7 key principals, but I believe that it may be a bit too dry to cover in this session. I’d like to just touch on what is immediately recognizable in my SRE work.
- #8 Site reliability engineering was coined by Google engineering teams and fundamentally involves engineering principals to help balance functional requirements with reliability. Note that SRE is a very opinionated way on how organizations want to run or achieve reliability. The principals may be the same but there are different approaches are possible and different organizations would build up their SRE teams focusing on different things. DevOps is quite similar to SRE. In some instances/literature, some people proposed that DevOps is an implementation of SRE concepts, since both are bridging Development and Operations together. In my opinion, both focus on different aspects. While SRE focuses on solving issues around operations, scale and reliability, DevOps focuses more on the Development and Release Pipeline. According to a 2021 report by the DevOps Institute, 22% of organizations in a survey of 2,000 respondents had adopted the SRE model.[11][12]
- #9 According to a 2021 report by the DevOps Institute, 22% of organizations in a survey of 2,000 respondents had adopted the SRE model.[11][12] In the 2022 report by Dynatrace, out of 450 SREs polled, only 20% claim to have a mature practice. Also there have been teams that have simply rebranded their Ops teams to call SRE, and/or DevOps teams. At the end of the day, we need to consider what kind of role they are really fulfilling.
- #11 I’m not going to drill to much into details of the principles, but I thought it deserved a slide, because it really what guides almost all the SRE work that happens. The principals are all quite closely related to each other, some are independent. E.g. Eliminating toil, and automation as you can guess are quite closely related. What I wanted to impress upon everyone here, is that yes, we to have a set of overarching principles that we rely on. Embrace Risk (and manage it). Understand that no service is 100% reliable. By allowing some small amount of risk, like having 99.5%, we can tradeoff that 0.5% risk for some other benefits, like faster deployments. We need to justify whether the associated risk is is worth the benefits we gain. Using SLOs and SLIs allow us to measure the actual performance of the service Eliminating Toil is about minimizing the
- #12 As I mentioned, SRE is very opinionated, so a bit of background on how organization has implemented SRE The JMS is about a year old, with plenty of new features in the backlog. The SRE team is still maturing. There are still a lot of work to be done as well.
- #13 In our organization, our SRE team deals with the DevOps aspects as well. The team owns the development pipeline and the process, on top of the SRE work. A lot of our pipeline is shared infrastructure: GIT repository, CI, artifact store, and CD/Deployment. We have teams that deal with those aspects of the pipeline, so we can concentrate on the customization parts that we need. We deal with a routine tasks, which are mostly automated. But at the end of the day, the process still needs someone to approve and execute it. In SRE work, change management refers to our component deployment process. There is already an established process in place, and SRE’s responsibilities involve deployment of the components to Production. In our team, we run 2 week sprints, which generally 95% of the time, ends with a production deployment. The process is 90% automated through a CD process, and SRE’s job is generally to approve a release deployment, and deal with any incidents. Our service requires deployment to 30+ sites, so we need to adopt a progressive rollout approach, and it takes a fair bit of time to complete, plus we have safeguards, like ensuring that a deployment is stable enough on a region/site before we move forward with the rest. We also work on incident tickets. The shared-services ecosystem that supports our system also generates tickets for us, in areas like resolving faulty components that failed in our production environments (e.g. chef failure) SRE work does affect development cadences. Sometimes we do become a bottleneck There’s really many aspects of the SRE / Ops work we can talk about, but we’re not going to. Disaster Recovery, Load Testing … all these are all intricately tied to the work that we do. My service SRE team priorities and responsibilities Availability Latency Performance Monitoring Change Management Emergency Response Capacity Planning
- #14 The SRE team touches many aspects of the overall product, and a lot on non functional requirements. To build up an SRE team is no easy feat. Our SRE engineers are a mix. Some come from a Development Background, and some from Operations and Infrastructure. As SRE, we need that big picture view of how these pieces fit together, then feed the requirements back into the development teams. Sometimes development does get short sighted on reliability requirements. especially in areas of scaling and workloads. Their focus is often on functional requirements needed to complete the story . There are parts of the system that need to be built into the product backlog. Logging, Telemetry, Audit to name a few. We need to influence architectural design decisions. Reliability needs to be built into the backlog. We need to build reliability from the beginning. In a 2022 survey, about 50% of 450 SRE engineers polled said that they dedicate a significant amount to influencing the design decisions.
- #15 A lot of the aspects of SRE work is interconnected. Like our topic : keeping the site up 24/7 involves many layers of complexity.
- #16 This is where I start to condense the content a bit. SRE is a huge multidisciplinary team and there is no easy way to tell you everything about it. Instead, in this session, I’ve picked out 2 aspects, or key areas that I think contributes to the reliability of the site. Remember murphys law ! What can fail will fail ! Of course SRE work is a lot more than that, and these 2 don’t cover even 10% of the work we do. But since we’re going to talk about 24/7, I thought I would pick out these 2. And they are very important ones that
- #17 The most common way to solve availability is hardware. And at a bare minimum, we need to put in a HA setup. To be HA requires us to have at least 3 nodes in place to help service requests. We also distribute the compute instance deployments to different Availability domains (different sites) and fault domains (different hardware) to reduce the risks. HA also opens up the options for having rolling updates when doing deployments and patching. Scaling (Horizontal / Vertical) with no downtime. Of course, we also need to ensure the components are able to support the configuration. Requirements like component heartbeat, being stateless and/or asynchronous. Availability is an outcome of the infrastructure engineering work that is being done. Balancing cost is important ! This is the key tradeoff in managing the redundancy aspect of site availability. Being redundant adds a layer of robustness into to the infrastructure
- #18 Observability is a really important aspect of SRE work. There are generally 3 key pillars, Telemetry, Logs and Tracing. I’m going to use the work observability and instrumentation very loosely here.
- #20 Java Management is a FREE service. Any OCI customers can use it. Our SLO is 99.95, which allows for 21 minutes of downtime monthly or 1.83 days. Planned / Regular maintenance does not count towards our downtime Failure of downstream services does not count towards our downtime SLA is also something that is usually business driven. SRE teams generally have no part in defining SLAs. (In our case, we’re a free OCI service, so we don’t have SLAs, only SLOs) Site availability is generally something that is too coarse grained to be useful for SRE work. Its useful for reporting to customers, management level reports, but from a SRE perspective, we need something a lot more granular.
- #22 Usually in development and pre-production, we may not be able generate sufficient load, or traffic behaviour to pinpoint issues, and these are the issues that will come up when we deploy to production. We need to look beyond what our metrics is collecting and analyze the information! Not all collected metrics end up in a SLO/SLI. Also to circle back, Observability is a very important property in the component. All this needs to be enabled by instrumentation built into the component itself. We also collect this information from our supporting tools, like our databases, queues, so choosing tools is important !
- #23 There are many aspects of SRE work that we do not cover in this 45 minutes. Things like security, compliance, incident management, error budgets, toil vs automation. I didn’t intend for this session to be a highly technical one, where we condense the entire SRE doctrine into 45 minutes, but hopefully, I’ve shared enough little nuggets of information to give everyone an insight into what SRE .. As in both the engineering work and the engineer role, is like.