SRE as a framework for new projects

One way to use this book is as a framework for working on a new project. As each chapter is about a different level of the hierarchy, you can work through the book to figure out where in the hierarchy your project sits. If it is a new project, then often it will be right at the bottom of the hierarchy, with no, or very little, monitoring implemented.

At each level, if there are others on the team, then you should begin a conversation to figure out what exists, and if it meets the team's needs. Each chapter will provide a rough rubric for that discussion, but remember that every team and project is unique. If you are the only person who is thinking about reliability and infrastructure, then you may end up spending a significant amount of time proposing solutions and pushing the project in a certain direction. Just remember that the point is to improve the reliability of the service, help the business, and improve the user's experience of the service.

You may find yourself distracted by each thing that you could fix. It is highly recommended to document the problems that you see first before diving in. Documenting first can be helpful in a few ways. Diving in is very satisfying, but it also may lead you to skip over requirements or spend too much time on a solution that doesn't work for your business (for example, integrating your system with a monitoring service you can't afford, or building a distributed job scheduler when you could have just used a piece of open source software).

So, when joining a new project, or evaluating a new service, here is a set of steps to follow:

  • Figure out the team structure. Who owns what? Who is in charge?
  • Find any documentation the team has for their service or the project.
  • Get someone to draw out the system architecture. Have them show you what connects to which service, what depends on the project, how data flows through the service, and how the project is deployed.
    SRE as a framework for new projects

    Figure 3: An example system architecture diagram. This is a very simple diagram that someone might draw on a whiteboard. Most companies will have something much more complex or detailed than this, but this is often the level of detail you need. Boxes with names and arrows show what talks to what.

    SRE as a framework for new projects

    Figure 4: Second example of an architecture diagram. This system is a classic static site generator model. The admin service creates or modifies things and writes update notifications into a queue. A worker reads data from the queue, does work on the data, and uploads it to a static object store, in this case vendor 2. Then, we put in some sort of CDN or serving system, in this case vendor 1 in front of vendor 2.

    Table 1: An example table with notes on people in the project. With this, we have a reference on team structure. If we need to know who to talk to about mobile apps, we can look at our handy chart and see that we need to talk to Kareem or the manager, Melissa.

    Now that you have context for the project, or service, start working through each chapter of the book and ask:

  • Does the service have monitoring?
  • Does the team have plans for incident response?
  • Does the team create postmortems? Are they stored anywhere?
  • How is the service tested? Does the project have a release plan?
  • Has anyone done any capacity planning?
  • What tools could we build to improve the service?
  • Is the current level of reliability providing a positive user experience?

Tip

The trick to note here is that these questions could be asked about a piece of software that has been running for years, as well as one that is just being created.

The service you are investigating could be a large project with many pieces of software (a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for example) or a single monolithic application. If you are working on a project with many services, then work through each service one at a time. The downside of this can be that if you want to build a framework that will fit all of the services you are interacting with, you will not know how best to solve the problems and needs of them until after you have done a bunch of research and work. The upside is that you will not be pulled immediately in many directions and will be able to focus on one specific service's problems.

Your time and energy are limited resources and, because of this, you will always need to work with more people than you have time for, so make sure to take it slow. Going slow will mean that things do not get lost in the cracks. You also do not want to burn out before each service has its base few levels of its hierarchy filled up.

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