Shifting Paradigms: The Rise of Reliability Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering has been at the forefront of ensuring the availability of complex systems, and creating operational excellence and automation. However, as companies grow, so does the need to think about long term strategic reliability needs.

Reliability Engineering represents a strategic shift in mindset and approach, going beyond reactive operational practices to proactively enhance system stability.

I have codified a framework from my experience creating and carving out a Reliability Engineering organization at Uber.

Complex systems and expanded scope

Our tech systems have become more complex, which means they need specialized focus beyond operational aspects. Addressing reliability concerns early in the SDLC requires a more holistic and collaborative approach that goes beyond the traditional SRE role.

Cross-functional collaboration

Ensuring reliability often requires close collaboration with development teams, product managers, infrastructure teams, and other stakeholders. SREs alone may face limitations in effectively coordinating and aligning efforts across these various functions.

Continuous improvement and innovation

Keeping up with the rapid advancements in technology, tools, practices, and methodologies is crucial for driving continuous improvement and innovation in system reliability.

In light of these factors, organizations are recognizing the need to explore alternative approaches, such as Reliability Engineering, to address the evolving demands of system reliability effectively.

So what is Reliability Engineering?

Reliability engineering is a discipline that focuses on ensuring the dependability and performance of systems, products, and services over their intended lifespan. The primary goal of reliability engineering is to identify and mitigate future failure modes and risks, thus enhancing the “-lities” of a system. (availability, reliability, maintainability)

Investing in reliability is no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses. The costs incurred due to failures resulting from poor reliability can significantly impact a company’s bottom line, leading to lost business opportunities and eroded customer trust. However, finding the sweet spot between investing in reliability and managing associated costs is key to achieving sustainable business growth.

How does Reliability Engineering create value?

Evaluate Reliability holistically

RE evaluates the reliability characteristics of components, subsystems, and systems holistically across engineering. This org will further establish standards and framework that drive improvements in reliability across the company, working in collaboration with product teams and Infrastructure teams. Reliability Engineering mitigates the financial impact of outages, reducing revenue loss and enabling consistent business growth.

Competitive Advantage

Reliability Engineering emphasizes automation, scalability, and proactive measures to streamline operational processes. Organizations that prioritize Reliability Engineering gain a competitive edge by offering more stable and dependable services.

Feedback Loops

Establishing feedback loops and data-driven processes to continuously monitor, analyze, and improve system reliability. This includes gathering reliability data, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and implementing reliability enhancement initiatives based on insights gained.

4 step framework to set a Reliability Engineering Org.

Reliability Engineering is a cross-company mission.

1) Create Reliability Squads that have champions across different teams

Reliability Squads are specialized teams within an organization that focus on improving system reliability and resilience. These squads work closely with product teams, infrastructure teams, and other stakeholders to ensure that systems are designed, implemented, and maintained with a strong emphasis on reliability.

2) Setup your Reliability Engineering team alongside product and infrastructure teams

Reliability is a cross-organizational function that collaborates closely with product and infrastructure teams. Reliability Engineering works with these teams to develop new policies and provide consulting on reliability-related topics.

3) Clear Collaboration processes

Reliability Engineering takes the lead in developing company-wide reliability-related processes and policies. They collaborate with leaders from across the organization to identify key areas for new processes, build consensus, and roll them out. Compliance with new policies and practices should be implemented incrementally for existing systems.

4) Set critical processes, framework and policies

Several critical reliability processes should be established.

• An Engineering Review Process, consisting of streamlined, templated “permit to build” processes with tiered review panels, ensures thorough evaluations of system designs.
• Production readiness processes ensure correct instrumentation, alerting, runbooks, and capacity/auto-scaling configurations.
• Classifying services into criticality tiers, establishing reliability requirements by tier
• Periodic disaster recovery drills are crucial components of these processes.

In conclusion, investing in reliability is not just a matter of preference but a business imperative. The costs associated with poor reliability can significantly impact a company’s financial health and reputation. By striking the right balance between investing in reliability and managing costs, businesses can achieve sustainable growth while delivering high-quality, reliable products and services.