4 tips for automation engineers interested in Site Reliability Engineering

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Software has undoubtedly become more complex over the last two decades. In 2000, it was estimated that there were 3.4 million internet users. The expectation of all software today has increased tremendously. To support these expectations, organizations have had to invest in reliability and operability of their systems. Zero downtime deployments, high levels of resilience to failure, and ease of restoring service are all key characteristics for any software system today. By Abigail Bangser.

More than ever we need teams to think about building the right thing for our customers, while also building to the right level of scalability and quality from the beginning.

Further in the article:

  • Automate more than tests
  • Assess risk at scale
  • Tirelessly focus on end user experience
  • Don’t be a bottleneck

SLO (Service Level Objective ) is a metric which can alert teams to declining user experience based on key indicators. As an SRE you will need to understand what user expectations are and how your team can measure these expectations using production data and all that without infringing on user privacy. The feedback from measuring these SLOs then feeds into team prioritization between defect management and shipping new features.

In conclusion, an SRE mindset is very similar to that of testing and test automation, but the roles do have space to work in tandem. Many testers and automation engineers work tirelessly to build high quality functionality for their users. Great read!

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Tags app-development learning devops cio agile management