SRE Roundtable with 4 DevOps Ambassadors A roundtable conversation about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Please join us as four of the DevOps Institute's Ambassadors discuss SRE. DevOps and SRE (and a little history of Google and SRE) - Helen Beal SRE and ITIL - Donna Knapp Benefits of SRE - Craig Pearson SRE and Security - Niladri Choudhuri And then the team will answer questions for 30+ minutes. We are very interested in hearing your questions. You can tweet them to @ITSMAcademy, add to the registration form, or bring them with you and chat in during the session.

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?

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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

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● 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?

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• 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

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• 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!