Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): A Complete Beginner Guide

Site Reliability Engineering – Visual Guide

SREWhat is SRE?

Site Reliability Engineering is a discipline that applies software engineering approaches to infrastructure and operations problems.

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Goal: Create scalable and highly reliable software systems

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Origin: Developed by Google to bridge Dev and Ops

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Philosophy: Treat operations like software engineering

📋Core Principles

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Embrace Risk: 100% reliability is impossible and expensive

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Set SLOs: Define specific, measurable reliability targets

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Eliminate Toil: Automate repetitive manual work

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Monitor Everything: Systems should tell you when broken

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Plan for Failure: Expect and prepare for incidents

📈The SLI → SLO → SLA Flow

SLIs

Service Level Indicators
What we measure
• Availability
• Latency
• Error Rate

→

SLOs

Service Level Objectives
What we target
• 99.9% uptime
• <200ms response
• <0.1% errors

→

SLAs

Service Level Agreements
What we promise
• External contracts
• Customer guarantees
• Business commitments

🎯 Error Budget Concept

If SLO = 99.9% availability, then Error Budget = 0.1% downtime allowed

70% Budget Remaining

Green Zone: Fast innovation • Red Zone: Focus on stability

⚙️Key Practices

🔍 Four Golden Signals

Latency

Request processing time

Traffic

System demand

Errors

Failed requests

Saturation

Resource utilization

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Incident Response: Structured process for handling outages

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Post-Mortems: Blameless analysis and learning

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Capacity Planning: Proactive resource management

🛠️Popular SRE Tools

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Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic

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Alerting: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps

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Automation: Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins

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Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure native tools

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APM: Application Performance Monitoring tools

🚀 SRE Implementation Roadmap

Assess Current State

Evaluate existing reliability practices, metrics, and incident handling processes

Define SLIs & SLOs

Identify key user-facing metrics and set realistic reliability targets

Build Monitoring

Implement comprehensive monitoring and alerting for your SLIs

Establish Incident Response

Create structured processes for handling and learning from incidents

Automate Toil

Identify and eliminate repetitive manual tasks through automation

✨Benefits of SRE

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Better Reliability: More stable services and improved user experience

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Cost Reduction: Lower operational costs through automation

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Faster Innovation: Clear targets enable rapid, safe deployment

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Clear Objectives: Measurable goals replace vague directives

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Reduced Burnout: Less firefighting, more engineering

🏢 SRE Team Models

Embedded

SREs work within product teams

Centralized

Dedicated SRE team serves multiple products

Consulting

SRE experts help establish practices

Hybrid

Combination of multiple approaches

🎯 Remember: SRE is a Journey, Not a Destination

Start where you are • Use what you have • Do what you can

Focus on user experience, embrace data-driven decisions, and continuously improve your systems and practices.