7 Habits of Highly Successful SRE

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a process that engineers use in IT operations. To implement SRE, it needs experienced engineers in software engineering and coding. They also need to cope up with new skills.

Here are seven habits of highly successful SRE:

1. Be Proactive and Analyze Every Change in the Context of the Bigger Picture

Be proactive means taking responsibility. A successful software developer continuously analyzes every change to find risk as soon as it appears and what impact it can make in the whole process, and it’s meaning in the broader infrastructure. Successful developers easily understand the importance of their code in the business and interpret things at a higher level. He can understand the bigger picture outside of the day-to-day.

2. Be Pragmatic and forward-thinking about the analysis

Successful developers take a pragmatic approach and think about how their work will affect the whole system and teams. A simple mistake can affect the person sitting on the other side of the entire system. Thus, a business needs someone who can understand solutions for particular issues that affect the whole system.

3. Willingness to Move on When Something isn’t Helping

Taking a pragmatic approach means being willing to dump the whole process. Sometimes developers start procedures with good intension, but it does not turn out to be productive. Once Google takes a new method called Change Acceptance Board (CAB) to deal with associated instability. Its goal was to help evaluate releases before the production of breaking changes from causing errors. But in reality, it slowed down the release process and increased the risk. So, they dump the process.

4. Think Win/Win and Embrace Every Opportunity to Automate

One of the key challenges of successful SRE is increasing the reliability of everything without slowing down the ability to deliver software quickly. Successful developers always try to find out ways to address painful manual tasks, bugs, and how to solve them by doing automation. Instead of doing time-consuming and inefficient things, they spend time to automate the unpleasant manual things. 

5. Pursue Organizations to Do What Needs to be Done 

One of the jobs of SRE engineers is to win friends and influence people. It involves convincing people to do the tasks that they may not want to do. They have to be an effective salesperson who sells their colleagues long term benefits of automating the process. 

6. Expand Existing Skill Set to Include New Tools and Approaches

SRE engineers are from different backgrounds. Some may vary from a developer background; others may benefit from traditional operation background. But whatever the context is, they need to move from the comfort zone. To cope up with the changing situation, they need to take training to include new tools and approaches. A successful developer is always ready to embrace new skills. 

7. Trust the Process

There are no proper guidelines for highly successful SRE. The engineers need to work tirelessly to find solutions, implement automation, and develop new skills. But the most important thing is to trust the process.

Different organizations use SRE differently. But there are some common characteristic or habits that every successful SRE follow. Runnel.ai