Reliability is everybody’s problem

 Reliability is everyone’s problem, not just the SRE's......

1. What barriers are there to SRE adoption?

<Shivagami Gugan>

There are no real barriers towards  adopting Site Reliability Engineering practices. Any organization irrespective of whichever level of maturity they currently exist today, can adopt SRE and improve its business outcomes. However, the key underlying principles of SRE and its applicability should be understood properly. There is a lot of hype around transformation, and the first barrier is about understanding what SRE means within your Organisational context. I find most of the time,  people try to imitate what highly mature companies like Google or Spotify or some other cloud-born company do, and this usually results in failures. SRE is the purest form of the implementation of DevOps. SRE is about removing the silos in a Product lifecycle towards achieving business outcomes in a safer, faster, cheaper, and better manner. If this is understood clearly, the first barrier gets removed.

The second barrier is to have this complicated vision of boiling the ocean - doing 100% Agile, 100% DevOps, or 100% SRE. This doesn’t work, especially when you have heritage systems of records, on-prem services, and heritage infrastructure, and a whole lot of baggage built over several years (sometimes decades) which is the usual case for most of the companies. So be wise in choosing target areas.

The third barrier is when you think SREs specializes in building operational reliability but do not have anything to do with the development or the deployment phases of the lifecycle. Reliability is everyone’s problem – the technical product manager, the developer, the tester, the support engineer; not just the SREs. The reality about the SRE role is to ensure service's availability and reliability by supporting the other teams that own these services. SREs are enablers, they are collaborators, and their goal is to ensure that the services are overall resilient, reliable and that incremental value is delivered in a continual manner. So they will have to wear multiple hats, sometimes depending upon the situational needs, chip in during design to ensure resiliency is built-in. Some other time they may be coaching and enabling teams to bake in proper observability within the product. The core value that anything “manual is evil” is applied across the spectrum. Hence they enable the team to automate using CI/CD flows, build quality measures towards self-regulation (such as test coverage, cyclo-complexity of code), automate deployments (infrastructure as code), automate closed loop remediations. 

You may now appreciate that, this means the role plays in the continuum of the  product lifecycle and is not just restricted to Operational aspects or incident response as we usually perceive the SRE role to be. Usually when an Organisation understands that implementing SRE is an underpinning cultural change that affects all part of the organization, then it becomes easier to remove the main barriers.

2. What human attributes or characteristics make someone a great SRE?

<Shivagami Gugan>

SREs are huge collaborators, they are people who are goal-driven, have big picture thinking and having the ability to work on multiple aspects of product resilience. This makes them multi-skilled, and people who have an extensive growth mindset. They should have the ability to get into details quickly, think on the feet and be brave towards problem resolution. And when any mistakes happen (they always do!), SREs have the ability to blamelessly look the situation which again makes them very cool headed and collaborative. They hate anything that has to be done more than twice and will always look towards automating anything that’s boring and repetitive. They are great coders.

 

3. What are the ways to spot a great SRE? 

<Shivagami Gugan>

·        SRE are coders. They know the toolset of the Product thoroughly.

·        If coming from the Dev side, they are programmers who understand infrastructure, can shell script and write interpreter code with ease. If coming from Ops side, they are the people who understand application design and development.

·        They ensure SLOs are set at correct boundaries of service, they define alerts to detect SLI thresholds

·        They measure and report performance against the SLI –Availability (Up time, Error Ratio –5xx/Total Requests)  Performance (RPS, Latency)

·        Their Operation load is capped at ~50 percent

·        They enable developers on CI/CD automation, quality thresholds  and deployment automation using infrastructure as code

·        They enable developers to understand how their applications are performing in production building observability, using distributed tracing and APM tools

·        They thoroughly understand deployment, fail-safe strategies - Rollback, Canary and Feature Flags.

·        They influence in building fault-tolerant, autoscaling, cost-efficient, highly performing design and architecture.

·        SRE should ensure consumption of platform standards, should raise pull requests to enhance SRE Product/ Tool chain features.

·        SREs ensure consistency of tooling - All lower environments use consistent methodologies and same tooling as used in higher environments.

·        SREs handle on-call events and do post mortems  (For e.g. They are adept with Memory dump analysis, Thread dump analysis, OS level diagnostics, Functional diagnostics)

·        SRE ensures error budgets are followed, they ensure self-regulation of velocity and stability  and ensure excess Ops work overflows to the Dev team

Excerpt from my interview on SRE, if you wish to learn more, tune into DevOps Institute SkilUp days, and listen in to the entire talk......

 Brihadharanya Upanishad

Excerpts from Kila Kanda (you may not understand a word of what is written below, and that is perfectly ok). Someonene who has gone through Upanishadic teachings will understand this easily. Some others who have gone through Bhagavad Gita's teachings may understand a few things but not fully.

As everyone is quite interested to know about what happens after death, the following is the direct verbatim translation on the topic from Brihadharanya Upanishads. It is ultra simplified, I apologize for the simplification. The intent is to make it reach a few soul-searchers at least, 

People are of 3 types

·        People who do Upasana (selfless spiritual devotion)

·        People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas Karma

·        People who are Charuvakhyas (just merrymaking on earth, the people who waste the Manusha Janama by being materialistic)

 

I.                 People who do Upasana (selfless spiritual devotion)

 

1)     People who do Upasana (spiritual devotion or in other words selfless devotion) on passing away will go through the bright path -> guided by Shuklamarga god, Uttarayana God, the god of sunshine, and will go to Surya Loka, Vidhyut Loka and finally guided by the Manasa Devata will be guided to BrahmaLoka. BrahmaLoka is also called SatyaLoka.

2)     Here Brahma will take classes and teach them about Swarupa (SatChit Ananda) from the Upanishads. It is mentioned clearly that they will not be taught the VedaPurva section (the section that deals with karmakanda) but only the Vedantha section (only the Spiritual guidance section like the Madu Kanda and Muni Kanda of Brihadharanyam).

3)     Brahmaji years are very long, and these souls will stay with Brahmaji until Pralaya Kalam.

4)     The souls that get Jnanam,(self-knowledge) will attain Jeevan Mukhti. They will then attain Videha Mukhti at the end of Pralaya Kalam. Then the entire process of New Srishti will start after Pralaya.

5)     Impt point: Such people do not come back to Earth. There is no Re-birth. Punaravarthathe... Punaravarthathe…. (they will not come back to Earth, they will not come back to Earth)

 

II.               People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas Karma 

6)     People who do Yajna-Dhana-Tapas karma earn Punya. Yajna in very short terms means Upasana but for worldly seeks (e.g. Jothishya homam for Swarga, Arthi, Arthathi types of devotees), Dhana is Charity, and Tapas is Self-discipline (self-denial, moderation of everything). This Punya will take them based on the gradation of Punya to Bhuloka, Bhuvar loka, Svarga loka, Maharloka, Janaloka, Taparlok etc

7)     They travel through the Krishnapaksha path, guided by Smoke god, night god, dhakshinayana god, god for Krishnapaksha and will reach one of the Swarga Lokas above.

8)     They will stay there doing Sevas to the Devas there (like assistants etc.) and enjoy the Swarga until the Punya gets depleted gradually and fully gets exhausted. There is no suffering, pain, disease there. Once the Punya gets over they will come back to Earth taking a Rebirth.

 

III.              People who are Charuvakyas (materialistic people who have wasted their Manusha Janama by being materialistic, neither did Upasana or Yajna-Dhana-Tapas)

9)     Charuvakis go through a path called “AdoGathi”. It is written that they will be born as germs, moths (patangs), biting insects and other smaller insects.

 

What is PanchaAgni Vidhya (doctrine of 5 fires)

This is one of the most toughest part of Rebirth that every Jivatma has to undergo. The travel journey after disposal of one body and attaining a new one is through a process called Panchagni Vidhya. The 5 fires are Heaven, Cloud (produces rain), Earth (produces plant eaten as food by the male), Male (Progeny), and Female (baby). The process is guarded by the guardrails of Sanchita Karma, Aagami Karma that will result in Prarabhda (new body, shape, color, which parents rich, poor, diseased, where etc. etc.)

https://www.advaita-vision.org/the-fires-of-reincarnation/

 

Side notes

               Sanchita Karma is the bank of karma for a Jivatma. All the pluses and minuses (Punya and Papam) account goes to Sanchita

               Prarabhda is a portion of Sanchita that is taken out for that particular birth (there is much more left behind in the bank). Prarabhda results in shape, color, parents, place, disease, luck, fortune, wealth etc. for the Jivatama for that particular Janam.

               Aagami Karma is the Karma that is created newly in the birth itself. If it can be consummated in the same birth, this will be fructified in the same birth (karma begets karma or as you sow, so you reap). In case the current body and circumstances are constrained and then the karma cannot fructify, then this will go to the Sanchita bank.

It is written that No karma will escape. Not even a pinpoint of both good or bad karma can escape a Jivatma. This is a self-regulated cycle across several Janamas.

  Best Way 

The best it appears is to attain Jnanam and attain JivanMukti on Earth.

There is only one way to attain Jnanam > Systematic study of Vedas and Upanishads under the guidance of an able Guru. This will purify the mind, elevate the person from materialism and make him/her understand the truest bliss of Satchitananda.

For such a Jnani, as quoted by Upanishads and Gita there is no Rebirth. For such people, the Sanchita and Aagami will burn, and at the end of Prarabhda such Jivas are released to respective forces of nature, never to be born again.          

The Link between Sleep and Performance of Leaders

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies, Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep’st so sound. —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar 

 In the passage above, Brutus enviously reflects on the timeless truth that people without worries and anxieties his servant Lucius, enjoys the most peaceful and uninterrupted rest. 

We have seen once in a while how senior execs, caffeinated and worn out, after hours of wakeful slumber, struggle to recall simple facts, seem disengaged and uninspired, lack patience with others, and can’t think through problems or reach clear-cut decisions. 

 McKinsey's research has highlighted a strong correlation between leadership performance and organizational health,2 itself a strong predictor of a healthy bottom line. the research found that four types of leadership behavior are most commonly associated with high-quality executive teams: the ability to operate with a strong orientation to results, to solve problems effectively, to seek out different perspectives, and to support others. In all four cases, is a proven link between sleep and effective leadership.

There is no merit when someone boasts  "I sleep for a couple of hours only" Research has time and again proven that all the good hormones in the body get rejuvenated during a good night's sleep. To say "Have a good sleep" is no panacea for the sleep-deprived. This is where mental fortitude, support from friends and family, spiritual well-being,  things like yoga, meditation, and reading soul-searching books help in the overall health of leaders -> physical, mental, psychological, making them truly empathetic and successful leaders.

Construction Industry Disruption with 3D printing

The future of construction?

🔎 Learn more about how 3D printing is being used in construction: https://t.co/J7H7DLvdbj pic.twitter.com/jvBOs1QkAA

— World Economic Forum (@wef) January 2, 2021

Sannapya Sannapya Ubhayatmi Kano Binnapya Binnapya Ubhayatmi Kano

 

Sannapya Sannapya Ubhayatmi Kano

Binnapya Binnapya Ubhayatmi Kano

Sangapya Nangapya Ubhayatmi Kano

Maha Adbhuta Anir Vacharniya Rupa !

Is there any Guru who can give a simplified explanation to this beautiful Sanskrit verse written by Adi Shankara almost 800 years ago in a Bhasyam called Vivekachudamani.

Observability in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering

Truly Amazing Team

 

Vishal Mishra

• 1st

Site Reliability Engineering Manager (DevOps) at Emirates Airline | Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

3w • 3 weeks ago

 

Shivagami, the best boss I ever worked with !!

But Why I am saying that? Because Shivagami is

Business Value Focussed: Shivagami always drove her actions and decisions based on How business can generate value from the initiatives.

Shivagami Always Carried her team with her: Unlike other bosses who present successful outcomes to their bosses alone, Shivagami always used to give opportunities to the team present the successful work to her bosses.

People Oriented: The career growth of Shivagami's team members was of paramount importance to her.

Fearless Boss: Shivagami never hesitated to take up the responsibility in case of any failure and always shielded the team, while still providing corrective feedback.

Confidence in Self and the team: She used to pick up difficult projects, based on sheer guts and confidence in turning it around. And she ensured the project became a success eventually.

Technology Savvy: She was always one step ahead than the rest in learning, presenting, and applying new technology and concepts.

Mentor: I personally always felt that I have a strong, large, protective umbrella on my head.

Bottom of Form

Shirley Adrain 1st degree connection 1stLeadership Coach and Facilitator | D&I Consultant and Trainer | Accelerating finance professionals' success across Asia.

 Well done Vishal Mishra for sharing this. Its so important that we thank true leaders for all they have done and shine a light on their work. Shivagami Gugan - you are a true leader in your field and “one to watch”. Fantastic to see how much you inspire those around you!

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Melvin Kingsley 1st degree connection 1stPrincipal Software Engineer at EMIRATES AIRLINE

 Shivagami Gugan : The mantle of "Leader" is not assumed by anyone but it is bestowed on by their many followers. I am drawn to her leadership by the positive energy she exudes which uplifts and buoys the spirits of those touched by her halo. I am encouraged by the belief and trust she places in every individual to stretch to reach their potential. Her energy and attention to the needs of the team created a wave of enthusiasm to deal with challenges with a focus on success. Shivagami Gugan enabled us to achieve together what would have been impossible alone & allowed us to see possibilities that were not on our horizon. Shivagami Gugan attitude towards continuous learning and adaptation to the changing world is an inspiration and a role model to emulate. Shivagami Gugan didn't need to convince us of her greatness, she persuaded us through her effectiveness and leading by example. When we had this trophy made to celebrate Shivagami Gugan, we had truly experienced what it meant to carry the mantle "World's Best Boss", she believed in us as much as she believed in herself.

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Niranjana Mangaleswaran 2nd degree connection 2ndBusiness Intelligence Manager at Allianz Australia

I agree with these wonderful comments and I wish to add my thanks to Shivagami Gugan - one of my favourite leaders. Shivagami Gugan: It was a pleasure to have started my role at Emirates under your marvellous leadership.  I thank you for persuading me to join SPARK; it turned out beneficial and allowed me to expand my Leadership skills. I thank you for supporting me in creating a new revenue stream together for SkyBrain; magic in just around eight weeks!  I thank you for your guidance and support throughout my journey at Emirates.  I thank you for motivating me to remain enthusiastic and constantly persevere when times were tough. Most of all, thank you for being an incredible leader. CONGRATULATIONS!! Stay awesome :)

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Frank Amankwah 1st degree connection 1stHead of Digital Engineering at Emirates Group

+100% Shivagami Gugan is an inspiration to us all: hashtag#driven, hashtag#tenacious, hashtag#humble, consummate hashtag#learner, a great hashtag#mentor, the list goes on.... Proud to have had the opportunity to work along-side such an inspiring hashtag#technologyleader. Onwards and Upwards....

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Wow, truly humbling, thank you

Irshad Safeer 1st degree connection 1stSoftware Architect

 Very true... the best boss

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Thank you Frank Amankwah , that's wonderful to know!

Like Shivagami Gugan’s comment

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Prakash K 1st degree connection 1stPractice Head / Integration Architect

I echo the words and you are a TRUE LEADER who always put your people first and help them to grow along. Thanks to all the amazing things that you have implemented

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Thank you Prakash K , my IaaS Integration as a Service Head. You did wonders in centralising and delivering a large number of APIs and gateways.

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Sumaiya Imran 1st degree connection 1stPMP®, Senior Techincal Engineer at Emirates Airline

 Totally Agree!! Shivagami Gugan, you are the best motivator, inspiring servant leader who strives to brings the best in others. Thanks for being such a wonderful person. May your tribe increase!!

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Truly Inspiring Mam Shivagami Gugan 👏👏💐💐

Unlike Jyotismita Tripathy’s comment2 Likes2 Likes on Jyotismita Tripathy’s comment

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Wow, Congrats Shivagami Gugan for your achievement!

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Shivagami Gugan   YouHead of Site Reliability Engineering & Cloud, Emirates Group

I am so deeply humbled by these words. You are AMAZING PEOPLE ! Discover your Strengths and do what you are Passionate about, Strive to do your Best every single day. Every Single day learn something new. You will create wonders!! Thank you and Stay Blessed.

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