Site reliability engineering (SRE) uses software engineering principles to automate large-scale IT operations and reduce IT risks related to delivery and deployment of software systems. SRE has matured and influences the day-to-day operations of every IT department across industry verticals. SRE principles and practices encompass various aspects of software engineering, helping build a strong digital ecosystem by de-risking infrastructural and operational concerns. Applying the principles of SRE can help organizations develop highly resilient and scalable software to enhance the digital experience.
Challenges
SRE can mitigate several challenges faced by organizations such as:
- Multiple releases on the same day that can cause business disruption leading to revenue leakage
- Limited application resilience to execute stable and seamless releases
- Lack of automation and traditional engineering methods, preventing high speed delivery
- Absence of expertise in performance engineering, impacting application scalability and resulting in a lower customer satisfaction index
- Lack of automation that adds to accumulated tasks in the production backlog
SRE Validation Framework
Though SRE addresses the engineering and operational aspects within an organization, SRE validation is critical for enterprises that want to focus on resiliency and operational readiness.
The core components of SRE validation focus on monitoring, reliability, availability, scalability, performance, capacity, and security to achieve end-to-end resilience. These components are mapped to a four-step framework as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – 4-step SRE Validation Framework
Step 1 – Business Workflow Validation
Business workflow validation covers automated testing of end-to-end business processes including component and middleware functionality, data quality and integration, and automation of user interface as well as omnichannel operations. The automation for this is powered by orchestration engines, including bots that can talk to different automation frameworks across technologies. It is supported by AI-based coverage analysis, test environment management, and test data management techniques.
Step 2 – Infrastructure Validation
Infrastructure level validation includes failover, back-up and restore, periodic infrastructure scans, and safety health checks as well as auto-scaling and elasticity checks. Observability ensures the required monitoring of various metrics and provides a dashboard for users to track and ensure speedy resolution of issues. Environment monitoring and validation alerts provide timely information on the status of the infrastructure and proactively alert users about recurring issues.
Step 3 – Resiliency Framework
Chaos engineering helps simulate failure injection scenarios to understand system vulnerabilities while end-to-end performance assurance helps gather data about the speed, responsiveness, and scalability of end-to-end business workflows. Activities such as game day simulation ensure that the chaos testing environment is as close as possible to how systems react during production.
Step 4 – Security Testing
A multi-layered security testing approach focuses on addressing application and infrastructure security. Application security validation covers static and dynamic security testing and covers all channels such as web, API, and mobile services while infrastructure security covers configuration reviews and vulnerability assessment. From a validation coverage perspective, cloud security testing and identity access management are important to identify and fix system vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
SRE is an imperative for every organization in today’s dynamic digital world. Systems resiliency and scalability are critical to prevent issues that can lead to loss of business and credibility. SRE validation is the key to ensure the required degree of high availability, speed, and accountability of business systems. SRE plays an important role in focusing on business continuity and helping anticipate issues that may occur during business operations.
