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As there is no Site Reliability Engineering dedicated stackexchange, I found this to be closes one.

There are multiple great resources to use as inspiration for slidedeck about SRE principles [SRE slides].

Still I can't find :

  • short
  • concise
  • examples
  • motivating spending resources to implement SRE in organisation.

Most what I experienced in my professional life were highly confidential cases and numbers. I am concerned that most numbers that SREs know, are to remain "internal" to be presented internally within corporations.

However, maybe you know some study, (preferably set of) nice examples of post-morthems (even one by one is good), from which we could make a strong arguments like "after introducing SRE model into organisation velocity of changes grown from n to m release pushes per x, with increase of availability by y and decrease of costs by z" (brainstorming) or other hard data points?

[SRE slides] - some examples:

P.S. If this question could be rephrased to fit better into this site guidelines, please provide me a suggestion in comment and give me a change to improve. Otherwise, I will appreciate other better platforms (However e.g. reddit.com/r/sre did not make great impression to me)

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    SRE Handbook is a great read for a team trying to implement SRE practices.
    – user9921
    Commented Sep 21, 2018 at 1:40
  • 1
    Chef.io has a bunch of resources, including 4 webminars about devops and speed which may inrerest you: chef.io/resources some customer stories like Rakuten could give you some insights also, I don't know a definitive hard rule guide that said
    – Tensibai
    Commented Sep 21, 2018 at 10:11
  • The book.ACCELERATE (Forsgene, Gene) does same for DevOps but some datapoints might be compatible, like a service MTTR (mean time to recover)
    – Ta Mu
    Commented Sep 26, 2018 at 1:49

2 Answers 2

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The types of numbers you're looking for might be hard to come across, because they're highly variable (even within one organization, it varies service-to-service and team-to-team, in my experience.) The SRE Workbook is now available for free, and includes two case studies (chapter 3) that might be helpful. Also, New Relic's SRE eBook does a really good job of summarizing SRE in a concise way.

Another way to approach this would be to try to use what you know about your service today to create a risk assessment and estimate downtime you can prevent if you had SRE and dev support to eliminate those risks

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  • Over time I understood that some decision makers will not realise risks after they happened. Therefore you need to make risk assessments and wait for things you predicted to happen or look for datapoints, e.g. to how many companies happened x&y that did not incorporated sre practices vs vice versa.
    – Grzegorz Wierzowiecki
    Commented Feb 12, 2019 at 16:56
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I am operating in both DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering organisations across several companies. I would say that SRE has the advantage of being far more concrete than DevOps.

  • DevOps emphasises principles and mindsets, for example, the three ways of DevOps: Systems Thinking, Amplification of Feedback Loops and a Culture of Continuous Experimentation and Learning. DevOps more of an extension to Agile that a different operating model.

  • Site Reliability Engineering emphasises the specific approaches, metrics and measures that Google (and others) apply to achieve a high level of service availability and confidence in the customer. f.ex: The ratio of toil to improvements, quantitative risk analysis and mathematical approaches to SLIs and SLOs.

Because SRE Implements DevOps it's a little unfair to try and compare organisations who do one but don't do the other, so I would actually suggest that all of the content in Accelerate can just as easily be applied to Site Reliability Engineering, thus if you need peer-reviewed data-driven analytics to start there.

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