Seeing the SRE anti-pattern is the easy part

I started my career in tech as a software engineer, not necessarily in the operations world. Over time—somewhat out of necessity at some of the companies I was at—the need for automating things on the infrastructure side became more and more in demand. I gradually migrated into increasingly operational roles with titles like DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, etc. I found myself more and more drawn to reliability work and I started to progress on that into more senior SRE roles and SRE leadership. Eventually at FanDuel, there was a need for someone to own reliability at a deeper level, and that’s where I came into the company to really define things like “What do we mean when we talk about reliability? What does it look like?”. A lot of my work centers on how we define reliability and the technology we use to make it happen.

SRE is no exception when it comes to having anti-patterns. We see this in Agile, with DevOps, CI/CD, etc. It’s really about understanding “Where might we be going wrong?”, and to understand that, we need to understand “What are we trying to achieve?”. Companies can be quick to fall into new fads and think of them as the new tool or process they need to adopt, rather than asking themselves what problem they need to solve in the first place. Start with the problem, look at the tools and resources available, and pick the best one to solve it.

I’m working with the Continuous Delivery Foundation to push forward the idea of what continuous delivery (CI/CD) means. We do a lot of promotion and events, we write technical pieces, we do workshops, and all that kind of stuff. My work is a little varied within the foundation but we’re always trying to push the boundaries or what CI/CD really means. One of the things I’ve been doing that I’m really passionate about is making the decision between automation vs “natural” CI/CD. Just because you have a build and deploy automation process, doesn’t actually mean you’re doing CI/CD. It’s also about the culture and the way you build. I point to Dave Farley’s stance on this often.

If people want to get involved in the Continuous Delivery Foundation, check out cd.foundation. We have meetups every month, we’re part of KubeCon and we do other events and smaller conferences as well, which you can find in the Community Calendar.

I think you’ll find DevOpsDays is a mix of hardcore tech and culture. There’s always a “core” organizer who is deep into the space gives their ideas about DevOps. The ideas go beyond specific tech and tools and really into the culture of DevOps and how to put it into practice. That’s what make these events special in my opinion.

I’ll be speaking at a few events in Portugal coming up, and I’m also looking forward to speaking at SREDay London in September. I really want to keep bringing more events here to Portugal. On top of that, I’m thinking of picking up some longer-form writing about anti-patterns in SRE from the things I’ve done.

➡️ You can follow along with Ricardo’s work at mccricardo.com!