So, a newsletter, eh? What have I gotten myself into? People even subscribed already and everything. And like not just my family. Heck, not even my family, but true-life real reliability nerds. I see you. I welcome you. I am not intimidated, nope.
Self-deprecation time over. I’m doing this because I want to write more. I want to write about reliability because I’ve been thinking about it for long enough and the best stuff happens when I stop thinking and start writing things down. Like in order, on paper, single-threaded. It makes me complete my thoughts, makes me question my beliefs, makes me confront my own contradictions. It’s great.
Hey look, there are pictures in this thing. Etienne is a cool name. Wait, what was I talking about?
Right: Reliability.
If you know me a little bit, you’ve probably already heard me apologize for the naming of r9y.dev (even worse, the pronunciation, “ronny”) — which in itself is a joke, but the content and the intent of the site is not. Is serious.
My working theory goes like this (long video version, small booklet):
People (developers, teams, organizations, companies, industries) are struggling to build and operate distributed systems. Because it’s hard, man. It’s just hard.
Google did a whole decade or two building this stuff and figured out a method. At some point the term “SRE” got out. There’s more to it than that, but SRE is a brand and a role and a conference and a bunch of things so that’s cool.
Things went a little awry. SRE wasn’t terribly well-defined. The books were aspirational and pretty philosophical. Lots of people got excited but then didn’t really know what to do next. Two steps forward, some number of steps back.
So what happened? DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE, Ops, Platform Engineering, Agile, Cloud, Microservices, all got people really confused. If I own it and I run it, what do we do with all these Ops people? Also what’s a kubernetes? Ah, forget it.
So where does that leave us? Lots of words out there, lots of ideas. Who does what? Are we just talking past each other?
So a shared vocabulary would be really helpful. I don’t want to dictate that, but I think it would be helpful to have a community effort around building that up. Like a wiktionary for SREs. Sure, that.
There’s gotta be more to it than that, though, right?
Knowing what exists out there only helps if you know what you want to do, where you want to go. And then it really helps to know where you’re starting out from. This is where the r9y-map comes in.
Where am I today? (What am I capable of?)
Where am I going? (What do I want to be able to do?)
What is my first/next step? (Where should I invest?)
It doesn’t always help to lay out a huge end state as the only goal. Start out easy, see what helps, what sticks. Adjust course as needed. Coarse, distant goals sound appealing, but they don’t actually help make progress, especially in the absence of experts (say, if there aren’t many of them), or when you’re in a new field (like SRE!)
Start out easy. Measure, review, repeat. (or: OODA)
There’s more to it, but that’s a good start for now. Hope you’re still reading!
This thing has a chat app!