Our SRE Journey — Part V
This is the final part about the TrainingPeaks journey in SRE. If you haven’t read them yet, Part I is how we started, which continues in Part II, Part III and Part IV.
Boring, Enabling, Critically Valuable Work
Our SRE journey has been full of projects large and small, though most of it is rarely seen as exciting to traditional software engineers or teams. It means a lot of unseen and less cutting edge work often taken for granted even by those who use it every day.
Rarely will this foundational work show up on a traditional product plan. For us it meant focusing on critical needs that support software delivery and operations. Continuously prioritizing based on the feedback of our systems, engineering teams, and internal and external users. Our plans tend to focus on weak signals to help anticipate needs. Those plans, while boring, we believe are key to a healthy growing and long term software organization.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Inspiration for our team and our mission was driven by us, but by no means did we come up with the principles, practices, and many ideas that we have put forth in these articles. In the end we are standing on the shoulders of giants and an amazing body of work. This work has been contributed to and continues to be refined by a wide inter-disciplinary community spanning software, human performance management, safety, reliability, resilience, systems and organizational thinking.
We’d be remiss to fail to mention and list some of the more influential sources:
- Accelerate
- The DevOps Handbook
- The Google SRE book
- The Phoenix Project / The Unicorn Project
- Drift into Failure, The Field Guide To Understanding Human Error
- Team Topologies
- Appreciative Inquiry
- Workplace Fatalities: Failure to Predict
- The Practice of Learning Teams
- Resilience Engineering
- Thinking In Systems
The End, The Journey Continues
Your journey will be different based on your organization and team maturity, your team capabilities and capacity. Your progress will be more based on your ability to recognize where you are, define your path, and continuously execute small measurable and impactful improvements. Having support from your organization is critical, since SRE and DevOps are a change from how traditional software engineering organizations operate. Focusing on creating a learning team and organization was our key to success, allowing us to learn and adjust.
If you enjoyed these articles and the topic and also enjoy podcasts, head on over to https://www.cloudcoffeetalk.com/ and subscribe to a new podcast started by one of our team!
Thanks for reading!
Todd, Erik, Ryan, & Chris
