1. FutuSuRE: the easy way to get started with SRE
Like any other improvement, site reliability engineering is a change. It changes the way you do operations in order to better serve business, developers and end-users, increase quality and get better ROI for the money you spend. Changes are by nature hard and success will require dedication and help.
Every business and organization is different, and a successful approach has to take that into account. Our FutuSuRE assessment is an easy way to get started regardless of your background.
The FutuSuRE assessment answers the following questions:
- What model of SRE fits your situation best?
- How can SRE help your development speed and operational efficiency?
- What is your current DevOps maturity and readiness for the change? What aspects need the most attention during the change?
- How to find the pilot team and scope that will give you the largest business benefit with the least amount of work?
- How to get started without huge upfront investments?
- What is the long-term roadmap and vision?
2. Scaling DevOps
We've helped our clients with their DevOps transformation and seen them gain huge benefits to productivity and culture from it. But as the number of autonomous DevOps feature teams increases, new challenges arise.
Sharing best practices and common solutions between teams might decrease as they concentrate on their own goals. Teams are forced to “reinvent the wheel” and come up with multiple very different solutions to the same problem. Also, staffing all the DevOps teams with the appropriate operations and security skills might be hard, which can lead to suboptimal solutions and security problems.
Part of the DevOps productivity boost comes from autonomy. That shouldn't be taken away, but there are other ways to remedy the situation.
Our solution to the problem is to introduce a centralized SRE team that works to support feature teams. The main benefits of an SRE team are:
- building enablers
- increasing self-service and
- harmonizing solutions
It achieves these by giving hands-on support as opposed to hiding behind tickets, and building extendable and secure solutions for common problems, such as:
- continuous integration and continuous development pipelines
- automated cloud project vending with proper access rights
- monitoring and logging
- making Kubernetes easier for developers
When scaling operations, we believe that DevOps feature teams should be able to decide the tools and solutions they use, but we can greatly help them by building shared solutions to use and extend as they wish.
3. Providing the teams and talent you need
There are plenty of talent needs involved in ramping up a centralized SRE support team to help your DevOps to scale, building platforms and shared solutions to reduce unnecessary work, setting up the necessary cloud foundations or developer toolchains and pipelines to increase developer productivity, and assuming operations responsibility of critical services.
Futurice can provide the necessary teams to solve your problems. Depending on your need, we can ramp up an entire SRE team with Futurice talent or together with your own IT and DevOps specialists. We have a long history of working in diverse environments and we are more than happy to gradually introduce more of your people into the team to reduce the need for external consultants. Our mission is to make our clients thrive and create as much business value as possible.
4. Co-creating world-class digital services with you
Creating and operating modern digital services requires multi-disciplinary teams. In order to take a service from idea to realized business value, from end-user requests to fulfilled wishes, and from a developer's laptop to production, a plethora of skills and knowledge is needed.
Operations skills are not an exception. The best result comes from building teams with the necessary skills from early on – and the principles of SRE play an important part in that.
At Futurice, we make a habit of preemptively thinking about how the maintenance, small-scale development, automation and operations will be done in the future, and we are also committed to helping your digital product teams take these considerations into account from the beginning.