What can SREs do to make the DevOps philosophy tangible?

I asked a bunch of digital friends who happen to be SREs and DevOps Engineers what they do to pull off the DevOps philosophy in their teams. What I learned follows...

👋 Hey, Ash here! Welcome to this week's instalment of the Cruform newsletter. Each week I look into a topic relevant to how production software work gets done.

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed recently:

1. Building resilient software through triple-loop learning

2. What makes SRE leaders highly effective

3. SRE: critical to the future of healthcare?

   (new-ish subscribers, please be aware that I am planning to focus on team dynamics oriented content once I get dry with SRE content — that might take a while!)

Earlier, I mentioned that I asked my SRE and DevOps friends about what they and their teammates do to make DevOps a reality.

Here are their responses in a slightly less-candid way 😆 than how they told me:

Obvious DevOps activities

• Setup load and integration testing to prevent regression of problems

• Optimise CI/CD flows (no more needs to be said about this)

• Monitor cloud environment

• Build out initial cloud environments or projects for developers

• Write code to automate out stuff that should be automated

• Resolve app downtime, inaccessibility and performance issues

Less obvious DevOps activities

• Coach the very new (< 2 years experience) and very tenured (anyone who developed software before 2010) developers on tenets of DevOps

• Learn and implement fixes for the problem across all future instances, not just the one that gets alerted (proactive vs reactive work)

• Learn and/or teach processes and technologies that will empower engineering teams to adopt DevOps philosophies

• Push hard onto intracompany politics e.g. sell the need for a faster approval workflow of firewall rule changes

• Constantly work out how to reduce meant time to response (MTTR) to problems when they arise (review past incidents regularly)

• Avoid meetings — a bugbear for everyone who works in an office because most workplaces don't do meetings well

• Explore new technologies in CNCF — many projects are coming out of sandbox and incubation, but a lot of us are yet to even look at the mature tools

• Really push for an SRE shift: monitoring, logging and alerting stack with dashboards for SLOs

• Flush out ongoing problems with CI such as downtime/slow responses on building infrastructure then make it go away.

And a few funnies to not take it all too seriously

• Meeting about the meeting to plan for the next meeting so we're ready for the sprint planning meeting to discuss why were not getting through all the tasks. It's a mystery but the PM wants another meeting because they don't understand what we discussed during the first meeting.

• Show developers why their code sucks (side note: be careful and gentle with your developer comrades, alright? Radical candor as a philosophy only seems to work at Netflix because they work hard at it)