Reliability Unleashed

From Chaos to Confidence

Vision & Overview | Technical Operations Excellence

182x
More Deploys1
2,293x
Faster Recovery1
70%
Auto-Resolution2
35+
Research Sources

What is SRE?

SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.

- Google SRE Book

  • DevOps is the philosophy; SRE is the implementation
  • 50% engineering / 50% operations cap (max toil)
  • Error budgets govern release velocity

10 Core Themes

#ThemeFocus
1FoundationsSLOs, error budgets, toil
2ObservabilityThree pillars, OTel, alerting
3ResiliencePatterns, blast radius, defense
4IncidentsResponse, postmortems, HRO
5ReleaseCI/CD, progressive delivery
6InfrastructureK8s, IaC, platform engineering
7AI/ML OpsNon-determinism, drift, MLOps
8Agentic OpsBot operations, autonomy
9CultureTeams, on-call, sustainability
10IndustryCase studies, benchmarks

DORA Elite Benchmarks

MetricEliteLow
Deploy FrequencyOn-demand> 6 months
Lead Time< 1 day> 6 months
Change Failure0-15%> 30%
MTTR< 1 hour> 6 months

Source: DORA State of DevOps 2024 - 36,000+ professionals

Four Golden Signals

LatencyHow fast?
TrafficHow much?
ErrorsFailing?
SaturationHow full?

Reliability is a Feature

Users don't distinguish between "the app is slow" and "the app is broken"

From Alert Fatigue to Autonomous Operations

70% auto-resolution | 30-second MTTD | <2 pages per on-call shift

Three Pillars of Operations

Reactive

Respond to incidents, triage alerts, execute runbooks

Proactive

Trend analysis, capacity planning, SLO monitoring

Predictive

Anomaly detection, AIOps, chaos engineering

Guiding Philosophy

Learn from industries where failure means lives lost.

- HRO Research

  • Blameless culture: Focus on systems, not individuals
  • Embrace complexity: Simple explanations often miss root cause
  • Authority to expertise: Knowledge trumps hierarchy in crisis

SRE Maturity Journey

LevelStateCharacteristics
1Ad-HocReactive, firefighting
2FoundationalBasic monitoring, SLOs
3StandardizedIaC, CI/CD, postmortems
4AdvancedPredictive, chaos, AIOps
5OptimizedAutonomous operations

Key Acronyms

SLI/SLO/SLAIndicator / Objective / Agreement
MTTR/MTTDMean Time to Recover / Detect
DORADevOps Research & Assessment
HROHigh-Reliability Organization
1 DORA State of DevOps 2023 (elite vs low performers)   2 Target based on industry AIOps benchmarks