SRE Best Practices

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Best Practices were popularized and developed primarily by Google, in particular by the Google SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team. The term "Site Reliability Engineering" was coined by Google and is an approach that combines software engineering and systems management to improve the reliability and performance of systems in production.

Google has shared its experiences and practices through conferences, blogs, and the book "Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems," which was co-written by several Google SRE engineers.

SRE Best Practices have been adopted and adapted by many other organizations in the technology industry and beyond. The SRE community has grown and evolved over time, contributing new ideas and approaches. Importantly, although best practices originated at Google, they have been modeled and spread by the broader community.

Best Practices:

Service Objectives: Define clear, measurable service objectives that indicate the level of reliability you want for your system.

Monitoring and metrics: Establish comprehensive monitoring systems that allow you to track the status of your system in real time.

Error budget: Implement an error budget that defines how many interruptions or problems you can allow before stopping development of new features.

Postmortems: Perform incident analysis (postmortems) to understand why problems occurred and how to prevent them from happening again.

Scalability: Design systems that can scale horizontally or vertically to handle increases in load without degradation of service. Use orchestration and resource management tools.

Reliability-oriented development: Includes reliability as a goal from the beginning of the development cycle. Development and operations teams must collaborate closely to ensure systems are reliable from the start.

Resilience: Design systems to be resistant to failure. Use practices such as redundancy, fault tolerance, and self-healing to minimize the impact of problems.

Reliability culture: Foster an organizational culture that prioritizes reliability and continuous improvement. This involves everyone, from developers to operators, in the pursuit of operational excellence.

Security: Security is an integral part of reliability. Make sure your system is protected from threats and that security best practices are followed.

Stress and Chaos Tests: Perform stress and chaos tests to evaluate how your system performs under extreme loads or unexpected conditions. This helps identify weaknesses and prepare for real failure situations.

Documentation: Comprehensively documents operating procedures, system architecture, configurations, and reliability policies. Clear documentation makes collaboration and problem solving easier.