This month Third Republic held the second in the series of SRE Republic meetups. The event was hosted at the incredible Personio Headquarters in Munich. Before the speakers took to the stage, the attendees were given the opportunity to network over a few drinks and some nibbles.
The SRE Republic meetup was lucky enough to secure three incredible speakers who provided our audience with some topical insights into the current world of SRE – David das Neves, Cloud Programme Manager at Google, Kordian Bruck, SRE at Google, and Pierre Piriou, Senior SRE at Personio.
All things SRE
David das Neves kicked-off the evening with a presentation all about SRE and why Google use it. He began by explaining that SRE is an implementation of DevOps and that it is just one approach that is working for Google. He describes SRE and DevOps in the following ways:
• Site Reliability Engineering – a set of practices we’ve found to work, some
beliefs that animate those practices, and a job role
• DevOps – a set of practices, guidelines and culture designed to break down silos
in IT development, operations, architecture, networking and security
David also stated in his talk that the key idea of SRE is having SLIs, SLOs and potentially SLAs, including an error budget for having shared goals for the level of reliability and the ability to integrate new features.
SRE pitfalls and how to solve them
Next up was Kordian Bruck, who is working as an SRE at Google. Kordian discussed the potential issues that can arise with implementing SRE on smaller scales and how to best go about solving them. Startups and mid-size companies often have different requirements.
Here are some of the key takeaways and discussion starters for your team from Kordian’s insightful presentation:
• Rainforest – streamline your tech stack
• Keep it simple – let developers participate in incidents and on call
• Measure and act on user impact, not hardware stats
• SLOs should work for your team – change them
The many shapes of SRE
For the final talk of the evening, we heard from Pierre Piriou, Senior SRE at Personio. Pierre has been working as an SRE for the past 3 years, and prior to this spent 10 years in IT. In his presentation, Pierre discussed the various reasons for SRE and the ways in which they implement SRE at Personio.
He also provided some detail into what it’s like to work as an SRE at Personio, saying that working in a smaller team encourages you to stick to strict processes and enables you to deliver efficiently. Pierre also discussed how SRE standards enable Personio to deal with numerous engineering topics and that the impact of SRE implementation was felt across the entire company.
Thank you
As the second SRE Republic meetup, the event was a great success. We would like to thank all those who attended the event and contributed to such a positive evening, with special thanks going to our superstar speakers, David, Kordian and Pierre. There were some great conversations had and insights shared.
If you would like to join our growing SRE Republic community and to attend future events sign up to our meetup page for details of future events here.
