Four Simple Steps to SRE Implementation
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A few months ago, we wrote about how the first step to implementing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in an organization is getting leadership on board. So, let’s assume that you’ve gone ahead and done that. Now what? What are some concrete steps you can take to get the SRE ball rolling? In this blog post, we’ll take a look at what you as an IT leader can do to fast-track SRE within your team.
Step 1: Start small and iterate
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” the saying goes, but you do need to start somewhere. When it comes to implementing SRE principles, the approach that I (and my team) found to be the most effective is to start with a proof of concept, learn from our mistakes, and iterate!
Start by identifying a relevant application and/or team
There are many factors that go into choosing a specific team or application for your SRE proof of concept. Most of the time, though, this is a strategic decision for the organization, which is outside the scope of this article. Possible candidates can be a team shifting from traditional operations or DevOps to SRE, or a need to increase reliability to a business-critical product. No matter the reason, it’s crucial to select an application that is:
- Critical to the business. Your customers should care deeply about its uptime and reliability.
- Currently in development. Pick an application in which the business is actively investing resources.
- In a perfect world, the application provides data and metrics regarding its behaviour.
Conversely, stay away from proprietary software. If the application wasn’t built by you, it’s not a good candidate for SRE! You need the ability to make strategic decisions about—and engineering changes to—the application as needed.
Pro tip: In general, if you have workloads both on-premises and in the cloud, try to start with the cloud-based app. If your engineers come from a traditional operations environment, changing their thinking away from ‘bare metal’ and infrastructure metrics will be easier for a cloud-based app, as managed infrastructure turns practitioners into users and forces them to consume it like developers (APIs, infrastructure as code, etc.)
Remember: Set realistic goals. Discouraging your team with unrealistic expectations early on will have a negative effect on the initiative.
Step 2: Empower your teams
Implementing SRE principles requires fostering a learning culture, and in that regard, team enablement means both training them, i.e., in regards to knowledge, as well as empowering them.
Building a training program is a topic in and of itself, but it’s important to think about an enablement strategy at an early stage. Especially in large organizations, you need to address topics like internal upskilling, hiring and scaling the team as well as onboarding and creating a learning community.
Your enablement strategy should also accommodate employees at different levels and in different functions. For example, higher leadership’s training will look very different from practitioners’ training. Leadership’s education should be sufficient to get buy-in and to be able to make organizational decisions. To drive change in the entire organization, additional training to leadership on cultural concepts and practices might be required.
When it comes to engineering leadership and/or middle management (managers that manage managers), training should be a combination of high-level cultural concepts to help foster the required culture, and technical SRE practices that are deep enough to understand prioritization, resource allocation, process creation, and future needs.
When it comes to practitioners, ideally you want the entire organization to be aligned both from a knowledge perspective as well as culturally. But as we’ve mentioned earlier, it’s best to start simple, with just one team.
The starting point for those teams should be to understand reliability and key concepts like SLAs, SLOs, SLIs and error budgets. These are important because SRE is focused on the customer experience. Measuring whether systems meet customer expectations requires a shift in mindset and can take time.
After identifying your first application and/or the team responsible for it, it’s time to identify the app’s user journeys, the set of interactions a user has with a service to achieve a single goal—for example, a single click or a multi-step pipeline, and rank them according to business impact. The most critical ones are called Critical User Journeys (CUJ), and these are where you should start drafting SLO/SLIs.
Pro tip: There are some general technical practices that can help you embrace SRE faster. For example, using less repos rather than more can help you reduce silos within the organization and better utilize resources.
Likewise, prioritizing automatic processes and self-healing systems can benefit reliability, but also team satisfaction, helping the organization retain talent.
Final note: Similar to the way that you make architecture decisions, your chosen technology, solutions and implementation tools should enable you to do what you are trying to do and not vice versa.
Step 3: Scale those learnings
After you establish these SRE practices with one or a few teams, the next step is to think about building an SRE community and formalized processes across the organization. In some organizations, you can do this in parallel to the end of step 2, and in some organizations, only after you have a few successful implementations under your belt.
In this phase, you’ll probably want to address community, culture, enablement and processes. You will need to address them all, especially as they are intertwined, but which one you prioritize will depend on your organization.
Creating an SRE community in the organization is important both from a learning perspective, but also to establish a knowledge base of best practices, train subject-matter experts, help create needed guardrails, and align processes.
Building a community goes hand in hand with fostering an empowered culture and training teams. The idea is that early adopters are ambassadors for SRE who share their learnings and train other teams in the organization.
It is also useful to identify potential ambassadors or champions in individual development teams who are passionate about SRE and will help with the adoption of those practices.
It is also crucial to create repeatable trainings for each functional role, including onboarding sessions. Onboarding new team members is a critical aspect of training and fostering an empowered SRE culture. Therefore it is vital to be mindful about your onboarding process and make sure that the knowledge is not lost when team members change roles.
LEARN MOREDeploying SRE training best practices to productionHow to “SRE” an SRE training program
During this phase, you also want to foster an org-wide culture that promotes psychological safety, accepts failure as normal and enables the team to learn from mistakes. For that, leadership must model the desired culture and promote transparency.
Finally, having structured and formalized processes can help reduce the stress around emergency response—especially being on-call. Processes can also provide clarity and make teams more collaborative and effective.
In order to have the most impact, start by prioritizing the most painful areas under your team’s remit—for example, clean up noisy alerts to avoid (or address) alert fatigue, automate your change management processes and involve only the necessary people to save team bandwidth. Team members shouldn’t work on software engineering projects while doing on-call incident management, and vice-versa. Make sure they have enough bandwidth to do both, separately. Similar to other areas, you want to use data to drive your decisions. As such, identify where your teams spend the most time, and for how long.
If you find that it is challenging to collect this kind of data, be it quantitative or qualitative, a good starting point is often your emergency response processes, as those have a direct impact on the business, especially around the escalation process, incident management and related policies.
Pro tip: All the above practices contribute to reducing silos and align goals across the organization; those should include also your vendors and engineering partners. To that end, make sure your contracts with them capture those goals as well.
Step 4: Embody a data-driven mindset
Starting the SRE journey can take time, even if you’re just implementing it for one team. Two quick wins that you can start with that will make a positive impact are collecting data and doing blameless postmortems.
In SRE we try to be as data-driven as possible, so creating a measurement culture in your organization is crucial. When prioritizing data collection, ideally look for data that represents the customer experience. Collecting that data will help you identify your gaps and help you prioritize according to business needs and by extension your customer expectations.
Another thing that you can do is run or improve postmortems, which are an essential way of learning from failure and fostering a strong SRE culture. From our experience, even organizations that do run postmortems can benefit from them much more with a few minor improvements. It is important to remember that postmortems should be blameless in order to make the team feel safe to share and learn from failures. And to make tomorrow better than today, i.e., not repeat the same problems, it’s important that postmortems include action items and are assigned to an owner.
Creating a shared repository for postmortems can have a tremendous impact on the team: it increases transparency, reduces silos, and contributes to the learning culture. It also shows the team that the organization “practices what it preaches.” Implementing a repository can be as easy as creating a shared drive.
Pro tip: Postmortems should be blameless and actionable.
On the SRE fast track
Of course, no two organizations are alike, and no two SRE teams are either. But by following these steps, you can help get your team on the path to SRE success faster. To learn more about developing an effective SRE practice, check out the following resources.
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FFF Enterprises See 80% Improvements in Speed at Lower Cost by Moving SAP Data to Google Cloud
FFF Enterprises, a pharmaceutical distributor of lifesaving biopharma products, vaccines and plasma products deployed SAP on Google Cloud to leverage its ability to scale server demands, reduce costs and improve speed and performance. Learn how the migration helps FFF empower healthcare to care!
Multi-cloud Adoption Empowers GCCs to be Resilient, Scalable and Future-proof: Whitepaper
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India has emerged as the Technology capital for the world – there are now at least 55 unicorns in India, nearly 600 funding rounds in just the last 30 months and 200+ GCCs expected in the next 2 years. There has been a rapid acceleration not just in the number of startups being launched, but also in the variety of technologies they are experimenting with.
India GCC’s are leading the transformation agenda for the enterprise and the pandemic has accelerated the inevitable. Technology now underpins every facet of a business: products, services, business processes, and how customers and businesses interact. As organizations are investing and progressing on their digital journey, they are increasingly relying on talent and teams across the globe to help them navigate the changes and build strategic capacity.
How is Cloud enabling this strategic change? This whitepaper compiled by ANSR and Google Cloud aims to expand on the following,
What is the cloud adoption story and how can it empower GCCs to be resilient, scalable and future-proof?
How have global teams or Global Capability Centers enabled the strategic and accelerated adoption of technology?
What are the key Cloud considerations for building an innovative, collaborative ecosystem for a thriving organization?
A Year of Going Carbon-free! Google’s Road to Sustainability Looks Promising
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Last year, we announced our most ambitious sustainability goal yet: to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. We’ve set this goal to ensure that Google Cloud continues to be the cleanest cloud in the industry, and to show that full-scale decarbonization of electricity use is possible.
Since setting our target, we’ve made tremendous progress in how we track, buy, and use electricity; advocate for clean energy policies; and support the development of new technologies to help us reach this goal. And we’ve done it all while maintaining a commitment to transparency that we hope will make it easier for other organizations wishing to fully decarbonize their operations as well.
In the spirit of transparency, today we’re releasing the 2020 carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers, as well as overall progress on the road to our 2030 goal: In 2020, Google achieved 67% round-the-clock carbon free energy across all its data centers, up from 61% in 2019. In other words, of all the electricity consumed by Google data centers in 2020, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis.
Though we saw a significant jump in global CFE% in 2020, we expect the numbers to vary from year to year. Ultimately, CFE% is dependent on the amount of new clean energy that comes online in a given year; we may even occasionally see short-term drops in the numbers. What’s most important is that we continue to maintain a long-term trajectory toward our 2030 goal. With meaningful progress in clean energy policy, technologies, and transactional models, we believe 24/7 carbon-free energy is achievable.
Tracking these numbers also allows us to give Google Cloud customers greater control in their own sustainability efforts. Earlier this year we announced Google Cloud Region Picker, a system that helps our customers assess factors like cost, speed, and CFE% as they choose where to run their applications.
To outline some of the events that have helped us get to 67% CFE%, we’ve developed an animation that shows every hour of electricity use in 2020, at all our Google data centers around the world.
Visualizing clean energy: every hour, every day, everywhere
Imagining what every hour in a year looks like is hard enough (there are 8,760 of them, in case you’re wondering). With 23 data centers and 25 cloud regions around the world, we’re aiming to source clean energy for over 200,000 operational hours each year.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9ecEokcFlk%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
The “A year in carbon-free energy” animation points out significant projects that came online in 2020 to bring our data centers closer to operating entirely on round-the-clock carbon-free energy. It also reflects an unparalleled level of transparency about our carbon-free energy data, showing hour-by-hour where we need to develop new clean energy projects, advocate for policy changes, and in some cases, look to new technologies that can help fill in the gaps left by variable renewable resources.
In the animation, you’ll notice sites with a lot of green at midday (e.g. in Chile or the U.S. Southeast) – a sign that solar is making a big contribution. Other data centers, such as our facilities in the U.S. Midwest, rely more heavily on wind power and are subject to seasonal fluctuations in wind speed.
Preventing the worst impacts of climate change will require decarbonizing the world’s electric grids, as fast as possible. Google is committed to doing as much as possible to clear a path for others and drive collective action to achieve this goal. We’re thrilled to be in good company as we move, together, toward a carbon-free future.
New Google Cloud regions are coming to Asia Pacific
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Digital tools offered by cloud computing are fueling transformation around the world, including in Asia Pacific. In fact, IDC expects that total spending on cloud services in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will reach 282 billion USD by 2025.1 To meet growing demand for cloud services in Asia Pacific, we are excited to announce our plans to bring three new Google Cloud regions to Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand — on top of six other regions that we previously announced are coming to Berlin, Dammam, Doha, Mexico, Tel Aviv, and Turin.
When they launch, these new regions will join our 34 cloud regions currently in operation around the world — 11 of which are located in Asia Pacific — delivering high-performance services running on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Enterprises across industries, startups, and public sector organizations across Asia Pacific will benefit from key controls that enable them to maintain low latency and the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, including specific data storage requirements.
“The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organizations’ increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in Asia Pacific. With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Daphne Chung, Research Director, Cloud Services and Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.
What customers and partners are saying
From retail and media & entertainment to financial services and public sector, leading organizations come to Google Cloud as their trusted innovation partner. The new Google Cloud regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand will help our customers continue to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems. We will work with our customers to ensure the cloud region fits their evolving needs.
“Kami was born out of the digital native era, where in order to scale globally we needed a partner like Google Cloud who could support us on our ongoing innovation journey. We have since delivered an engaging and dependable experience for millions of teachers and students around the world, so it’s incredibly exciting to hear about the new region coming to New Zealand. This investment from Google Cloud will enable us to deliver services with lower latency to our Kiwi users, which will further elevate and optimize our free premium offering to all New Zealand schools.” – Jordan Thoms, Chief Technology Officer, Kami
“Our customers are at the heart of our business, and helping Kiwis find what they are looking for, faster than ever before, is our key priority. Our collaboration with Google Cloud has been pivotal in ensuring the stability and resilience of our infrastructure, allowing us to deliver world-class experiences to the 650,000 Kiwis that visit our site every day. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand, and are looking forward to more opportunities to partner closely on our technology transformation journey.” – Anders Skoe, CEO, Trade Me
“Digital transformation plays a key role in helping Vodafone deliver better customer experiences and connect all Kiwis. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand and look forward to working together to offer more enriched experiences for local businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Jason Paris, CEO, Vodafone New Zealand
“Our journey with Google Cloud spans almost half a decade, with our most recent partnership and co-innovation initiatives paving the way for AirAsia and Capital A to disrupt the digital platform arena in the same vein as we did airlines. The announcement of a new cloud region that’s coming to Malaysia – and Thailand too if I may add – showcases Google Cloud’s continuous desire to expand its in-region capabilities to complement and support our aspiration of establishing the airasia Super App at the center of our e-commerce, logistics and fintech ecosystem, while enriching the local community and giving all 700 million people in Asean inclusivity, accessibility, and value. I couldn’t be more excited about this massive milestone and the new possibilities that Google Cloud’s growing network of cloud regions will create for us, our peers, and the common man.” – Tony Fernandes, CEO, Capital A
“Google Cloud’s world-class cloud-based analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools have enabled Media Prima to embed a digital DNA across our organization, deliver trusted and real-time news updates during peak periods when people need them the most, and implement whole new engagement models like content commerce, thereby allowing us to diversify our revenue streams and remain at the forefront of an industry in transition. By allowing us to place our digital infrastructure and applications even closer to our audiences, this cloud region will supercharge data-driven content production and distribution, and our ability to enrich the lives of Malaysians by informing, entertaining, and engaging them through new and innovative mediums.” – Rafiq Razali, Group Managing Director, Media Prima
“Google Cloud’s global network has been playing an integral role in Krungthai Bank’s adoption of advanced data analytics, cybersecurity, AI, and open banking capabilities to earn and retain the trust of the 40 million Thais who use our digital services to meet their daily financing needs. This new cloud region is a fundamentally important milestone that will help accelerate our continuous digital reinvention and sustainable growth strategy within the local regulatory framework, thereby allowing us to reach and serve Thais at all levels, including unbanked consumers and small business owners, no matter where they may be.” – Payong Srivanich, CEO, Krungthai Bank
“Having migrated our operations and applications onto Google Cloud’s superior data cloud infrastructure, we are already delivering more personalized services and experiences to small business owners, delivery riders, and consumers than ever before – and in a more cost efficient and sustainable way. With the new cloud region, we will be physically closer to the computing resources that Google Cloud has to offer, and able to access cloud technologies in a faster and even more complete way. This will help strengthen our mission: to build a homegrown ‘super app’ that assists smaller players and revitalizes the grassroots economy.” – Thana Thienachariya, Chairman of the Board, Purple Ventures Co., Ltd. (Robinhood)
Delivering a global network
These new cloud regions represent our ongoing commitment to supporting digital transformation across Asia Pacific. We continue to invest in expanding connectivity throughout the region by working with partners in the telecommunications industry to establish subsea cables — including Apricot, Echo, JGA South, INDIGO, and Topaz — and points of presence in major cities.
Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions.
- Source: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Whole Cloud Forecast, 2020—2025, Doc # AP47756122, February 2022
What Are India’s Biggest Companies Doing on Google Cloud?
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In the last year, there’s been an upward trend in cloud adoption in India. In fact, NASSCOM finds that cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% per annum to cross the US$7 billion mark by 2022.
At Google, in our conversations with customers, discussions have evolved beyond cost savings and efficiencies. While those are still very relevant reasons for adopting cloud technologies, Indian enterprises are looking to Google Cloud to help them drive digital transformation, identify new revenue generating business models, reach previously untapped consumer markets, and build customer loyalty through greater insight and personalization.
Here are some companies and their stories.
Tata Steel: Mining data and maximizing its power
Tata Steel is a great example of an established enterprise from a traditional industry that is modernizing and embracing cloud computing. With an ambition to be a leader in manufacturing in India and a digital-first organization by 2022, Tata Steel believes smart analytics is key to enhancing operational efficiency and gaining business advantage.
To organize data from siloed systems across the organization and make it easily accessible to all employees, Tata Steel is using Cloud Search and plans to scale it to more than one million documents and 28 disparate enterprise content sources including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SharePoint. In fact, Tata Steel is one of the first Indian enterprises to harness the power of Cloud Search to meet some of the most aggressive ingestion demands, with indexing durations reduced from weeks to seconds.
They are also leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery to build their data lake and enterprise data warehouse so they can take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning. Managed services such as AI Platform further enable Tata Steel to manage end-to-end AI/ML workflows within the GCP console. This complements their existing on-premise reporting and analytics tools, and brings data management to the forefront of everything they do—from forecasting market demand to predictive equipment maintenance.
“Digital is not just a goal, it’s become a way of life. We are digitizing everything from the deployment of factory vehicles to improving material throughput to marketing and sales. As a result, we have petabytes of structured and unstructured data that is not only waiting to be mined, but that we can generate intelligence from to create opportunities across our multiple lines of business using GCP,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation & Digital Solutions at Tata Steel.
Helping L&T Financial Services reach customers in rural communities
In rural communities, quick access to financial services can make a tremendous difference to livelihoods. L&T Financial Services provides farm-equipment finance, micro loans and two-wheeler finance to consumers across rural India backed by a strong digital and analytics platform. Their digital-loan approval app, which runs on GCP, makes it significantly faster and easier for people to apply for financial assistance to purchase important things such as farming equipment and two-wheelers. It also helps rural women entrepreneurs get quicker access to funds for their businesses through micro loans.
L&T Financial found G Suite to be a far better collaborative tool to help staff work together efficiently. Employees can interact with each other in real time using Hangouts Meet, and the task of information sharing is more seamless and secure through Drive. BigQuery also helps L&T Financial Services generate behavior scorecards to track credit quality of its micro-loan customers.
“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years.” said Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services.
Creating conversational connections for Digitate’s customers
Digitate, a venture of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), has integrated Dialogflow into its flagship brand ignio, an award-winning artificial intelligence platform for driving IT operations, workload operations and ERP operations for diverse enterprises. This integration is the next step in ignio’s product development journey, and will enable users to chat or talk with ignio to detect issues, triage problems, resolve them and even predict system behavior.
“ignio combines its unique self-healing AIOps capabilities for enterprise IT and business operations with Dialogflow’s AI/ML-based, easy to use, natural and rich conversational capabilities to create an unparalleled, intuitive and feature-rich experience for our customers,” says Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Digitate.
Indian enterprises going G Suite
The base of Indian enterprises that are making the switch to G Suite to streamline their productivity and collaboration also continues to grow. Sharechat, BookMyShow, Hero MotorCorp, DB Corp and Royal Enfield are now able to move faster within their organizations, using intelligent, cloud-based apps to transform the way they work.
A hybrid and multi-cloud future in India
IDC predicts that by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds. (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2019 Predictions — India Implications (# AP43922319). We look forward to sharing more success stories of Indian enterprises that have taken the next step in their digital transformation journey.
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