Establishing SRE Foundations with Vladyslav Ukis

A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.

✨ “SLO breaches are user experience breaches.”
–Dr. Vladyslav Ukis

I like how Dr. Vladyslav Ukis put this, since, many times, we’re looking at SRE as a strictly technical discipline in charge of keeping the reliability up. When we talk about reliability, we put some weird polarized glasses that remove all user-related wavelengths and keep only technical-related ones. We see only CPU, memory, and network parameters without any clue what effect that has on the user experience. These technical parameters may be perfectly fine, but due to some unexpected combination, the user may suffer from experience degradation.

When we talk about SRE, it’s not Sites that need reliability. Sites couldn’t care less. Users need reliability to experience our services at its finest hour.

Therefore, I boldly propose we replace the SRE acronym with a new, more appropriate one: USER (User Should Experience Reliability). It’s a bit of a “GNU’s Not Unix,” but it does its job. And are we now “USER engineers”?

I know this is a very bold thing to propose, and it’s never going to happen – (who will reprint all the books? :))) – but we should always keep the users in our sight. The 2023 State of DevOps Report confirms that focusing on users predicts strong organizational performance. QED.

The conversation with Vlad was so insightful, don’t miss it.

Build – Elements of an Effective Software Organization – In this short e-book, Rebecca Murphey and Otto Hilska give a nice overview of using DORA, SPACE, and other frameworks to elevate the effectiveness of software organizations.

CNCF Platforms White Paper – Great paper by CNCF explaining the value of the platform, challenges in implementation and measuring success.

Developer Enablement at Spotify – Pia Nilsson shares how Spotify tackles developer effectiveness and how Backstage emerged as a tool for glueing the engineering organization together.

Much has been written on SRE practice, and Google shared many incredible resources. However, some of these resources may be overwhelming for folks who need a different angle on the topic.

Establishing SRE Foundations is a lighter primer on SRE practice written from practical experience.