The document details a roundtable discussion among DevOps institute ambassadors covering the topics of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), its comparison with ITIL, and its benefits. Key points include SRE's origin, primary responsibilities related to reliability and security, and the adaptability of ITIL practices to enhance service management. Benefits of SRE for organizations and individuals include improved service reliability, operational efficiency, and enhanced workplace culture.

1. 1© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
SRE Roundtable with 4 DevOps Institute Ambassadors
Helen Beal Niladri Choudhuri Donna Knapp Craig Pearson
@BealHelen @niladrimc @ITSM_Donna @craigpearson004

2. 2© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 2© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Agenda • DevOps and SRE
• SRE and ITIL
• SRE and Security
• Benefits of SRE
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
• Panel Discussion
• Your Questions!

3. 3© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
POLL How familiar are you with SRE?

4. 4© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 4© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Origins and Comparisons
DevOps SRE
Started as a movement from DevOps Days Started at Google
2009 2003 - but the first book published 2016
Started as ‘agile system administration’ Started as a need to scale
Dev led Ops led
Key concept: CICD Key concept: Wisdom of Production
Focus on speed Focus on stability
Scales to the enterprise Designed for the enterprise
@BealHelen

5. 5© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 5© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
● In general, an SRE team is responsible for availability, latency,
performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring,
emergency response, and capacity planning (Google)
● Numerous ITIL practices contribute to these activities
● SRE principles and approaches can be used to adapt ITIL practices
● SRE is particularly relevant to organizations looking to achieve
higher levels of velocity
SRE and ITIL
@ITSM_Donna

6. 6© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Leveraging SRE Principles and Approaches
• Service level management
✓ Define service level objectives (SLOs)
✓ Measure using service level indicators
(SLIs)
✓ Service level agreements (SLAs) include
the consequences of not meeting SLOs
• Change enablement
✓ Form an error budget (one minus the
availability target) and set
consequences
✓ Error budgets are the tool SRE uses to
balance service reliability with the pace
of innovation
✓ Ideally, spend the error budget taking
risks
• Incident management
✓ Leverage swarming; particularly for high-
impact incidents
✓ Draw on concepts from the Incident
Command System (ICS)
✓ The Incident Commander role concentrates
on the 3Cs (coordination, communication,
control)
• Problem management
✓ Postmortem culture: learning from failure
✓ Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE
culture
• Continual improvement
✓ Foster a culture of continuous
experimentation, learning and
improvement

7. 7© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
POLL How do you use error budgets?

8. 8© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 8© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
• As per Google, Security and Privacy are closely related concepts.
• In designing for reliability and security, you must consider different risks.
Primary reliability risks are non-malicious in nature like a bad software
update or a physical device failure. Security risks comes from adversaries
who are actively trying to exploit system vulnerabilities.
• Reliability and Security Tradeoff – Redundancy
• Reliability and Security Tradeoff – Incident Management – Special small
team with skills to handle security related incidents
• Security and Reliability is about Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability
SRE and Security
@niladrimc

9. 9© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 9© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
• Intersection of Reliability and Security – Effects of Insiders
○ Design of Security and Reliability
○ Design for least privilege
○ Design for understandability
○ Design for resilience
○ Design for recovery
○ Mitigating Denial of Service (DOS) attacks
SRE and Security
@niladrimc

10. 10© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 10© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
• Enhanced stability and reliability of services - SRE is about reliability
• Better understanding of how production services work - through observability
and shared “wisdom of production”
• A better balance between the investment in customer experience and
technical reliability - SLO’s are business objectives
• A greater appreciation of the operational impact of services in development
teams - shift left, SRE’s in teams, designing for operations
• Improvements in staff morale and retention - HOW? LET’S CONSIDER THE
INDIVIDUAL FIRST….
Benefits of SRE - for the Organization
@craigpearson004

11. 11© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 11© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
• A better work balance with ring fenced time for improvement - 50% split,
operational v improvement work, a clear focus on toil reduction
• Less stressful on-call experiences and a reduction in overall call-out volumes -
automation of incident response, “chaos engineering”, blameless post mortems
• Broader skills-based opportunities that leverage the latest in automation - a
future-proof “toolbox”
• An improvement in workplace culture - Westrum model
• Opportunities for “shifting left” and helping to ensure development teams deliver
more reliable services - getting the wisdom of production into teams
• WHICH SHOULD LEAD TO - Improvements in morale and staff retention
Benefits of SRE - for the Individual
@craigpearson004

12. 12© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
POLL What % of time do you spend on
toil?

13. 13© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 13© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Agenda
PANEL
DISCUSSION

14. 14© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Helen Beal Niladri Choudhuri Donna Knapp Craig Pearson
@BealHelen @niladrimc @ITSM_Donna @craigpearson004

15. 15© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated 15© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Agenda
Q&A

16. 16© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated© ITSM Academy unless otherwise stated
Helen Beal Niladri Choudhuri Donna Knapp Craig Pearson
@BealHelen @niladrimc @ITSM_Donna @craigpearson004
THANK YOU!