No matter how you define it, the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role is clearly expanding into more and more companies. To be effective in this new role, SREs must possess a depth of understanding of how different systems work together, how they fail, how they can be improved, and how they can best be designed and monitored.

1. ©2008–18 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved
SRE-iously!
Defining the Principles, Habits, and
Practices of Site Reliability Engineering
Beth Long, Senior Software Engineer

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Our Speaker
Beth Adele Long
Senior Software Engineer
New Relic
@BethAdeleLong
linkedin.com/in/beth-adele-long

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Housekeeping
3
Today’s webinar is being
recorded. A link to the recording
will be emailed to all registrants
shortly after.
Please be sure to ask
any questions via the “questions
panel”
There will be a brief survey after
the webinar for any additional
questions or feedback.

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New Relic is Your Partner on Your DevOps Journey
4
NEWR
NYSE – 2014
16k+
Customers
1.8B
Scale: Events & Metrics per Minute
13,500+ Disruptors2,000+ Global Enterprises
50%
of Fortune 100 Use NR

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“Part of the [Apollo program] culture
was to learn from everyone and
everything, including from that which
one would least expect.”
Margaret Hamilton

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The SRE Handbook
But what if you’re not Google?

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What is Site Reliability Engineering?
Site Reliability Engineering
applies Software Engineering to Ops:
Software Development Lifecycle
System Maintenance
System Lifecycle

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SRE at New Relic
Goal
Continuously improve
reliability of systems in the
New Relic platform.
1
Roles
Pure SRE
Embedded SRE
2
Spheres
Stability
Reliability
Engineering
3

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How it was
On-Premises
On Premises
Relational Data
Customers
NoSQL
Data Store
Public Cloud
Micro Services
API
Mobile
Apps
Browser

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We Asked Our Stakeholders
Why do we have
SREs at New
Relic?
What’s the vision
for our SRE team?
How can SREs most
effectively contribute to the
future of our platform?

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One Goal
Continuously improve
the reliability of systems in the
New Relic platform

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Two Roles
Pure SRE
Build and support our
core internal platform:
Container Fabric
Networking Systems
Embedded SRE
Partner with Eng Teams
Domain Experts in:
Reliability
Tooling
Scaling

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Three Spheres
13
Stability Reliability Engineering

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What SREs Do
Champion reliability best practices.
Guide designs and processes with an eye toward resilience and low toil.
Reduce technical complexity and sprawl.
Drive the usage of tooling and common components.
Implement software and tooling to improve resilience and automate operations.

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SRE Tasks
Work with teams to adopt
operational best practices
Building, or helping teams adopt,
core shared internal platform components
Stay current on the New Relic
platform, and know the top risks
for their team(s)
Improve the monitoring and
observability of the New Relic platform

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SRE Tasks (continued)
Implement automation, tooling, and
application code to improve reliability and
reduce toil.
Mentor less senior SREs and grow
the SRE community and practice
at New Relic
Perform task-based operational work (toil) as required.

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Keys to SRE Success
Reliability is a feature Query your stakeholders
Reliability depends on
shared understanding
Develop clear, specific guidelines
SRE is a challenging,
cross-disciplinary practice
Build a strong SRE community

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SRE at New Relic
Goal
Continuously improve
reliability of systems in the
New Relic platform.
1
Roles
Pure SRE
Embedded SRE
2
Spheres
Stability
Reliability
Engineering
3

19. ©2008–18 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved 19
Learn more at
newrelic.com/devops

20. Thank You
©2008–18 New Relic, Inc. All rights reserved
@BethAdeleLong
@ToriWieldt