{"id":19716,"date":"2021-06-29T10:20:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-29T16:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/?p=19716"},"modified":"2022-04-26T04:25:07","modified_gmt":"2022-04-26T10:25:07","slug":"devops-to-sre-making-the-desired-culture-a-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/blog\/engineering\/devops-to-sre-making-the-desired-culture-a-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"DevOps to SRE: Making the Desired Culture a Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past year at FullContact, the DevOps team has transitioned into an SRE team, and we couldn’t be happier. Our DevOps team functioned like many other DevOps teams and matched well with a sentiment I hear from fellow attendees at every DevOps-oriented conference I’ve attended, from DevOps Days to KubeCon. “DevOps is just a rebranded SysAdmin\/Ops person\u2026.”<\/span><\/p>\n

We primarily handled infrastructure and tooling like CI\/CD to make the developers’ lives more efficient and productive. But we still operated apart from our teams, disconnected and sometimes clashing with work other teams had planned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my mind, DevOps is a culture, not a role. Sure, it centers around some tooling, and that tooling needs to be maintained by someone, usually with a bit more Ops skill sets. But with DevOps comes a\u00a0<\/span>culture<\/span><\/em>\u00a0of empowered engineers paving the way to rapid releases, automated deployments, efficiently configurable infrastructure, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n

For us, the SRE role is the embodiment of DevOps culture applied. When we set out to move towards having SREs, we took a moment to understand what we wanted from someone in the SRE role, what skills they should have or work towards acquiring, and how they would work with the teams they embedded into.<\/span><\/p>\n

What do we want from an SRE?<\/h3>\n

To determine what we want from an SRE, we took a step back to understand what their impact would look like on our infrastructure. We want our infrastructure to constantly be moving towards a highly automatic and self-healing system. Resistant to failure, yet easy to maintain from an engineer’s point of view. This would require our SREs to be collaborative. They would work\u00a0<\/span>with<\/span><\/em>\u00a0the team to design and implement our systems, driven by data, to progress towards our desired state of a more resilient, highly automatic, and self-healing system.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also want our infrastructure to be visible. Adding and optimizing our metrics and alerting system to provide the correct information at the right time enables us to react faster and make better software development decisions. This would require our SREs to give our services and platform a voice through observability.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to observability and resilience, we also want our infrastructure to be ordered and structured. As an SRE for FullContact, we would need our engineers to provide recommendations to their teams on designing their systems with best practices and in a consistent, repeatable way.<\/span><\/p>\n

What should an SRE have?<\/h3>\n

Now that we understand what the outputs of our SREs should look like, we can outline what expected abilities they should have or attain to be successful. The list we came up with is as follows:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n