In today’s world, it’s even more important for platform engineers and engineering leaders to push ownership of databases to the left and make developers own their databases. The organization needs to automate as much as possible and minimize communication between teams. While we achieved many improvements in the DevOps area and even included other aspects in the same way like security (with DevSecOps), configurations (with GitOps), or machine learning (with MLOps), we still keep databases out of the loop. Let’s see why that is a problem and why we should make developers own their databases.

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This blog post tackles how to implement core Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles even if you don't have a dedicated SRE team. It simplifies complex SRE concepts like error budgets, SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs, making them understandable for beginners.

The blog post offers a step-by-step guide to get you started with SRE, including:

Defining what matters to your customers (SLIs)

Setting achievable targets for those metrics (SLOs)

Considering how much downtime you can afford (error budgets)

Identifying and automating repetitive tasks (toil)

Implementing ways to easily rollback deployments if necessary

Prioritizing team well-being to avoid burnout

Maintaining open communication to set realistic expectations

Overall, the blog emphasizes that SRE is a gradual process that can significantly improve your system's reliability and provide a better customer experience.

This blog post explains how to conduct valuable incident postmortems to improve your incident response process. Incident postmortems are reviews done after an incident to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

The key points are:

Incident postmortems should focus on understanding the root cause (how) of the incident, not just what happened.

Hold regular postmortems, even for minor incidents.

Use data to guide your discussion and identify trends.

Appoint a neutral facilitator to lead the discussion.

Create a safe space where everyone feels comfortable sharing information.

Set clear goals for the postmortem beforehand.

Use retrospective exercises to encourage participation and brainstorm root causes.

Measure the effectiveness of your postmortems to ensure everyone benefits.

Foster a culture of open communication to learn from incidents.

Focus on identifying systemic issues, not individual blame.

Use frameworks to guide your questioning and delve deeper.

Take time to understand the root cause before brainstorming solutions.

Utilize incident activity timelines to visualize the incident response process.

Consider using collaboration tools designed for incident response.

By following these tips, you can create meaningful incident postmortems that strengthen your incident response and help your team learn from past experiences.

On-call scheduling is a common practice for ensuring someone is available to address critical issues outside of regular work hours. This blog post explores challenges faced in on-call scheduling for incident response teams and how to overcome them.

The five pitfalls discussed are:

Unclear responsibilities: Clearly define what's expected of on-call staff.

Lack of flexibility: Allow staff to swap schedules and have backups.

Infrequent rotation: Establish a fair rotation plan with advanced notice.

Inadequate backup plans: Include secondary or tertiary on-call responders.

Ignoring location and time zones: Consider the "follow the sun" method or accommodate preferences.

The blog post concludes by mentioning Squadcast, an incident management solution that can streamline on-call scheduling and improve overall SRE practices.

SRE - the innovative blend of software engineering and IT operations reshaping digital infrastructures! Uncover its core principles, evolution, and vital role in ensuring flawless performance and reliability. #SRE #DigitalInfrastructure #ReliabilityEngineering Discover how load balancers bolster SRE..

This blog post explores monitoring tools used by DevOps engineers and SREs to maintain IT infrastructure health and ensure service reliability. It covers the three main types of monitoring tools (network, server, application performance), factors to consider when choosing a tool, and provides a list of popular options including Prometheus and Zabbix.

The importance of incident management is also addressed, highlighting Squadcast as a tool that integrates with monitoring tools to streamline the incident resolution process. By combining monitoring and incident management, teams can effectively respond to issues and minimize downtime.

Overall, the blog emphasizes selecting the right tools to gather the necessary data for optimizing IT infrastructure performance and ensuring a positive user experience.

This blog post explains the concepts of SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs, all of which are important for measuring and ensuring service quality.

SLI (Service Level Indicator): A measurable value that reflects how well a service is performing. Common examples include uptime, latency, error rate, and throughput.

SLO (Service Level Objective): A target value for an SLI. It essentially defines the desired level of service quality.

SLA (Service Level Agreement): A formal agreement between a service provider and its customers that outlines the service quality guarantees, often based on SLOs. SLAs typically involve penalties if the SLOs are not met.

The blog post also highlights the benefits of SLOs and provides best practices for implementing SLAs and SLOs. Some key takeaways include:

SLOs help teams collaborate and set measurable goals for service quality.

SLAs should be transparent and based on realistic SLOs.

It's better to start with simpler SLOs and gradually increase complexity.

Timing of outages can significantly impact customer satisfaction.

By understanding these concepts, organizations can establish a framework to deliver high-quality services and maintain a competitive edge.

This blog post discusses how to scale Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams effectively. It emphasizes that adding more people is not always the best solution and explores alternative methods such as utilizing SRE tools and improving processes.

The blog post highlights specific categories of SRE tools that can help teams handle more load, reduce errors and rework, eliminate certain tasks, and delegate work to other teams. It cautions against implementing these tools without a cost-benefit analysis as they can be expensive and disruptive.

When adding people to the team is necessary, the post advises on capacity planning including using data to project workload and considering the experience level of new hires. It also emphasizes the importance of building a diverse team with the right cultural fit.

This blog post discusses how IT alerting software can be overloaded with redundant notifications, making it difficult to identify and resolve critical incidents. It introduces key-based deduplication as a solution to this problem. Key-based deduplication helps group similar alerts together based on user-defined criteria, reducing alert noise and allowing IT teams to prioritize effectively. The blog also explains the difference between key-based deduplication and alert deduplication rules, and provides a step-by-step guide for setting up key-based deduplication in Squadcast, an IT alerting software platform. Finally, it highlights the benefits of using key-based deduplication, including reduced alert noise, improved prioritization, optimized resource allocation, and mitigated alert fatigue.