Hayden Wade’s Post

TL;DR : Expecting smooth sailing in digital project maintenance is overly optimistic 🔄 Mastering Unplanned Work in IT 🔄 Unplanned work is one of the biggest disturbers of all. It often disrupts schedules and drains resources, preventing developers from working efficiently to deliver quality on time. Below are some examples: - Urgent security patches - Last-minute compliance issues - Unexpected server downtimes 🛠️ Quick Tips to Handle Unplanned Work: 🛠️ - Prioritize Wisely: Not all unplanned tasks are equally urgent. Always push back what's irrelevant, not urgent, or with no impact. - Limit Work In Progress: Keep the focus tight to avoid spreading the team's attention too thin. - Use automation: Automate routine tasks to reduce errors and free up valuable time for more impactful work. By effectively managing tasks we can handle unplanned work without losing sight of our main priorities. Pro tip: Dedicate a separate capacity for unplanned work in a context where it happens frequently. In some projects 90% for the regular tasks and 10% for the unplanned work may be quite fine. #DevOps #Productivity #ITManagement #Maintenance #DigitalProducts This post's image was generated using Stable Diffusion 😁

The priority matrix, an essential tool in incident classification, visually maps incident severity and urgency. It categorizes incidents based on predefined criteria and provides a clear framework for prioritizing them.   By assigning priority levels, organizations can allocate resources effectively and minimize the impact of incidents on their operations.   Consider a scenario where a company experiences a major software bug that causes its customer-facing website to crash during a peak sales period.     Without an incident priority matrix: The incident management team might not recognize the high urgency and impact of the bug, potentially treating it as a routine issue. This misjudgment could delay the response, resulting in significant financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and damage to the company's reputation.   With an incident priority matrix: The matrix helps the team quickly assess the incident's severity and urgency, categorizing it as a high-priority issue. Resources are immediately allocated to resolve the bug, minimizing downtime and mitigating the impact on sales and customer experience. The incident response team can take swift action, restoring the website's functionality and protecting the company's revenue.     #incidentmanagement #sre #DevOps

Performance engineering is critical for delivering fast, reliable, and scalable applications. If you start to experience things like frustrated users, strain on your infrastructure, and development and deployment challenges, it's likely that you have a performance engineering challenge on your hands. Here are a few tips on how to jump-start your application performance management discipline today, for more reliable applications tomorrow: https://lnkd.in/dtPPhpjh

∞ 𝘿𝙚𝙫𝙊𝙥𝙨 𝙀𝙭𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 ∞ 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻:  - Defines project goals, scope, and requirements, identifying stakeholders and resources. 📝 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱:  - Involves coding, compiling, and packaging, emphasizing version control and code management. 🔧 𝗧𝗲𝘀𝘁:  - Ensures software aligns with quality and functional standards, utilizing automated and security testing. 🧪 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆:  - Releases software precisely using deployment automation and monitoring tools. 🚚 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲:  - Ensures operational stability, promptly addressing issues with management tools. 🛠️ 𝗢𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲:  - Analyzes data from software and production using logging, tracing, and metrics tools. 🔎 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: - Gathers ongoing feedback, utilizing loops, surveys, and analytics for improvement. 📊 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀:  - Cultivates a culture of collaboration, communication, and continuous improvement for faster, better, and safer software delivery. ♻️Repost if you find it valuable! 🔔 Stay tuned by following Sonu Kumar, and let's embark on this journey together. #devops #systemdesign

Advanced Deployment Strategies https://lnkd.in/dhMEsQnp In today's software development and deployment, maintaining agility, stability, and security is crucial. Centralized configuration management and feature flags are tools that help in achieving these goals. Integrating these into an organization’s DevSecOps process provides the flexibility needed to respond to changes quickly and effectively.  Feature Flag Driven Development (FFDD) Feature Flag Driven Development (FFDD) is a software development approach that uses feature flags or toggles. These flags help to control the new feature deployments. The main goal of FFDD is to separate the development and release of new features. This provides flexibility to development teams and allows them to roll out features gradually and choose specific user groups to test them.

Being proactive will always deliver more quality in work because in reactive scenarios you don’t used to have ample time!! It’s same as we have Change management (for proactive streamlining) and incident management (for reactive streamlining) in our software engineering arena!! #softwareengineering #oneliners #peripheralRequiredKnowledge

Key Components and Best Practices of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is pivotal in maintaining and improving the reliability and performance of software systems. 🚀🌟 Here are the key components and best practices to ensure success in SRE: Key Components of SRE: Service Level Objectives (SLOs): Quantifiable goals for system performance and reliability. 🎯📈 Service Level Indicators (SLIs): Metrics that measure the performance and health of a service. 📊🔍 Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Formal agreements defining expected performance and reliability. 📝🤝 Monitoring and Alerting: Tools and processes to track system health and notify teams of issues. 🚨🔔 Incident Management: Plans and processes to address and resolve system incidents. 🚑🔧 Automation and Tooling: Automating repetitive tasks to reduce human error and increase efficiency. 🤖🔨 Capacity Planning: Forecasting and preparing for future capacity needs. 📆📉 Error Budgeting: Balancing reliability with innovation by allocating acceptable error thresholds. ⚖️🚀 Release Engineering: Implementing CI/CD pipelines for rapid and reliable deployments. 🚀🔄 Chaos Engineering: Introducing controlled failures to test the system's resilience. 🌪️🛠️ Best Practices for SRE: Define SLOs: Set clear and measurable objectives for service reliability. 🎯📏 Automate Tasks: Use automation to handle repetitive tasks and reduce manual intervention. 🤖🔧 Monitor Continuously: Implement robust monitoring to catch issues early. 🕵️♂️🔍 Foster Collaboration: Encourage cross-team collaboration for seamless operations. 👥🤝 Incident Response: Develop and maintain comprehensive incident response plans. 🚨📋 Postmortem Analysis: Conduct thorough post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence. 📝🔍 Capacity Planning: Regularly analyze and plan for future resource needs. 📊🔮 Error Budgeting: Use error budgets to balance new features and system reliability. ⚖️✨ Adopting these components and best practices will enhance the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of your systems. #SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #DevOps #Tech #Automation #Monitoring #IncidentManagement #CapacityPlanning #ErrorBudgeting #CI/CD #ChaosEngineering

📍 Service Reliability Hierarchy Achieving optimal service reliability requires a structured approach that encompasses various key aspects of system operations and development. The following hierarchy of components is essential for maintaining a reliable service, starting from the foundation of monitoring to the pinnacle of delivering a workable product. Monitoring Without effective monitoring, there's no way to ascertain if the service is operational or to gauge its performance. Implementing comprehensive monitoring ensures that you're always aware of the system's state, allowing for swift detection and response to any issues that arise. Incident Response Incident response is about more than just identifying problems—it's about implementing immediate, effective solutions. This may involve temporary measures such as reducing system precision, disabling certain features to allow for graceful degradation, or rerouting traffic to stable instances of the service. The ultimate goal is to sustain service functionality and reliability, irrespective of the issue at hand. Postmortem and Root-Cause Analysis A key philosophy of SRE is to encounter and resolve each problem only once. Repeatedly dealing with the same issue is inefficient and unproductive. Conducting thorough postmortems and root-cause analyses enables teams to understand why an incident occurred and how it can be prevented in the future. This process is critical for evolving service reliability and ensuring that efforts are focused on new challenges rather than recurring problems. Testing Understanding potential failures is only the first step; actively preventing these failures is crucial. Testing is an indispensable tool in this preventive arsenal. A well-designed test suite can verify that the system is free from specific vulnerabilities before it goes live, significantly reducing the likelihood of production incidents. This proactive approach to reliability underscores the adage that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Development The development phase is where concepts and plans are transformed into actual software. This stage should be influenced by insights gained from monitoring, incident responses, and testing. By integrating reliability principles into the development process, SREs can ensure that the software is robust, resilient, and capable of meeting the desired reliability standards from the outset. Product Achieving a reliable, functioning product is the ultimate goal of every SRE effort. This stage represents the successful implementation of all preceding layers of the hierarchy, culminating in a service that meets both the functional and reliability expectations of users and stakeholders. Image source: Site Reliability Engineering Book #devops #sredevops #sitereliabilityengineering

Want to reduce on call incidents? Start with your release process. Sure, you may have CI/CD running. Or you may be pushing to main on Heroku or Vercel. But getting code, migrations, and infrastructure configurations out there is only half the job. Consider the following: ❓ Is there a place where people can see the release progress? And do people hear about the release only if and when an incident occurs? ❓ Can you see how the feature behaves in production before it’s available? ❓ Are you releasing an entire feature at once? Unmonitored "big bang" releases are a recipe for needless incidents. You still want to move fast. But adding a little bit of process will keep your releases smooth and consistent: ✅ Use checklists. You will be amazed by what you are forgetting to do. Top of the list should be “let stakeholders know we are doing a release.” 🚩 Add feature flags to get code intro production sooner. Flip them on for your team, off for everyone else. You don’t know how code will behave at scale until it is live. 🪜 Break large features down into stages. Do refactoring in earlier stages so new features are well-supported. Otherwise, you risk having to roll back everything. 🥂 Celebrate the release! Go ahead, brag about what the team has accomplished. Record a quick demo and post it where everyone in your organization can see it. By using these techniques, you reduce the frequency and severity of incidents. Your teammates, stakeholders, and users will thank you. And everyone will be aware of all the amazing work your team is delivering 🚛 So next time you are planning a feature, add a little process. Then celebrate! Want help with your release process? I’m available. Send me a DM! #HumanScaledEngineering #SoftwareEngineering #IncidentManagement 

It's a great principle of #AgileSoftwareDevelopment to be able to deploy changes as quickly as possible. But what does that actually mean? It depends - of course it does. When you first start on a new project, the tests are quick to run, and deployment is quick, and you can have a simple "build, test, deploy" pipeline that's triggered from every commit. This is what the #ContinuousDeployment folks are talking about. If you can do it, it's great. As a product becomes more complicated, it gets harder, because - The tests start to take too long to run every commit. Especially the "non-functional" (though I hate that term) ones around performance and security. - Deployments start to take a long time, so redeploying often causes significant downtime. In the first instance, you should try to mitigate these issues. Are your tests depending on slow external data sources that can be made quicker? Can you update and deploy parts of your system separately so you don't need a full system restart? Performance and security testing are intrinsically large volume and slow, though, so there's only so much you can do. The minimum deployment interval that makes sense is the time your pipeline takes to run. You might need to cut a release branch to run these slow tests on for a fully signed off production release (see my article here https://lnkd.in/ef48TJvn), which might extend your normal release pipeline to a couple of days. This is obviously not ideal. But, if you have to do this - can you at least deploy to *internal* or *public beta* systems without running the slow tests, understanding that there could be issues and there is no SLA on those systems? Having your development and test systems updated at least daily is important for fast feedback. You'll see CI/CD advocates on your feed saying that, if you have to do this, you are objectively wrong and bad at software. I don't think that's helpful. The perfect CI/CD deployment pipeline is a great aspiration. If you can't get there (for legitimate reasons) for production systems, at least try to get close to it for development and testing (including client feedback, if it's a consultancy scenario).