Why SRE is important: Site Reliability can have a massive impact on your revenue. We’re diving into the reasons why.
Below is a transcription of the video above which covers, our Managing Director and 15-year Software Engineer, Marc Firth’s overview of “Why SRE is important”.
Video transcript:
Why SRE is Important
Marc: You know all those processes, your engineering teams put in place to automate what seems to be every little thing?
Well, guess what? Those little things can add up to a lot and that’s what we’re discussing today.
Why SRE and Automation are Important
Marc: Hey, everybody. Glad to have you here.
Today we’re talking about why SRE and automation are important.
So if you’re not in engineering, or you’re a lesser experienced engineer, you might wonder why experienced engineers seem to spend so much time on automation and put so much value in automating the day-to-day tasks.
Now, you may also have been in the job for a while. Maybe you’ve been an engineer for several years, but you’ve not seen the value of automating and really getting into Site Reliability Engineering and doing away with the toil.
So what we’re going to go on today is why it’s important to do that and the benefits to your business and what this can actually do for you in terms of making your life easier.
Why you might want to consider prioritizing SRE and automation
Marc: So here are a few reasons why you might want to consider prioritizing SRE and automation. These are the same reasons you can use to get buy-in for SRE from internal team members, management, stakeholders, customers, and basically anybody who’s got a say in where the budget is spent on the application.
Impact on UX
Marc: So when it comes down to it, stability has an impact on user experience. And user experience is a big thing. This is why we now have so many different UX specializations.
Basically, if your customers have a bad time, they’re not going to be customers for very long. And especially not if your competitors are doing it better. Experiences that are full of bugs or slow or just don’t work or have any downtime are just going to irritate them.
It’s the equivalent of going into a shop, walking up to the counter and being ignored or not even being able to get through the front door. If it keeps happening, you’re not going to go back because you had such a bad experience. The same thing is true with our sites and our services and the APIs that we build for customers. If they don’t work, they’re not going to keep using them.
Page Speed affects Revenue
Marc: It can have a cascading impact too. For example, a slow page speed can affect a website’s SEO rankings because page speed matters to Google. A lower SEO ranking is going to mean that your users are not going to find your website, for instance; assuming that’s the thing [your SLOs] are optimizing for.
A poor UX affects Revenue
Marc: A poor UX through bugs or slow page speed will lead to a drop in sales or product or feature adoption; leading to a drop in revenue.
For page feed alone, every second after 2.4 seconds loses 7% of traffic, and that’s just page speed! For bugs in the critical path, the key features of our goals or services, it’s going to be worse. Poor UX affects brand perception and the experience matters to your customers.
Automation vs hiring
Marc: If there’s a shortage of engineers, automation will help your team circumvent the hiring challenge [to a degree].
You can automate processes such as deployment, testing, making database changes and much, much more. You can have monitoring and alerting so that if something does go wrong, the downtime is as short as possible.
Automation helps with onboarding and code standards
Marc: If you standardize your processes, it’s going to help with your onboarding and ensure that the code that doesn’t meet your standards doesn’t make it to production.
The balance between automation and feature development
Marc: It’s important to note that there’s a balance to be struck between releasing new features and ensuring reliability for users.
You still want to be progressing in terms of feature development, but ultimately, if you keep your customers happy, they’ll keep paying your bills. Because really, for most businesses, that’s the main concern; it’s giving the customers a good experience that is memorable and brings them back.
The goal of SRE is to enable us to move faster, ship more features and not worry about repetitive tasks, such as reliable deployments [by automating them].
If I was to summarize SRE in four words, it would probably be “making service goals reliable”.
A bit about our Managing Director, Marc Firth
Marc: For those of you who don’t know me, I am Managing Director at Firney, a Managed Cloud Services Provider.
Prior to Firney, I was a software engineer and I managed a team of about 50 engineers working on Fortune 500 company websites and applications. I’ve been an engineer for about 15 years now; and this [YouTube channel] is for helpful videos on Site Reliability Engineering, engineering processes and general updates on the business.
News: Web Summit in Lisbon
Marc: In other news, we’re going to have a stand at Web Summit in Lisbon this year.
If you don’t know what Web Summit is, it’s an annual exhibition and conference with 70,000 attendees. There’ll be loads of top brands, talks, investors and partners, and it always gathers a huge crowd. So if any of you are going to be there and you’d like to talk to us,
I believe you’ll be able to find us in the “Startup” section.
But anyway, that’s it for today, so please let me know if you have any questions in the [YouTube] comments.
We’ll be doing many more of these videos, digging into a bit more detail.
So please like this video, if you found it useful; and share it with your friends and colleagues.
Subscribe for more and I’ll see you in the next [YouTube] video.