An outside, professional view that can help you increase software reliability

A message from the founder

My name is Ash, and I am the original force behind SREpath, but no longer the only one.

Our goal is to distill and share advice that we learn from some of the best Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practitioners around the world.

Our learnings come from experience, conversations, and technical reviews.

Organizations of many kinds need SRE

My experience shows that SRE resonates better with certain types of organizations.

It will most benefit SaaS, eCommerce, financial, and media companies where:

• software is a critical value driver for revenue
• they run large-scale systems to support user demand and
• systems need to meet stringent uptime or performance targets

My first taste of Site Reliability Engineering

I first experienced the value of SRE while working as the product lead at a cloud-native SaaS startup in the US around the mid-2010s.

We had constant incidents, performance woes, and capacity issues, which SRE promises to address proactively.

This triggering experience piqued my interest in the software reliability discipline.

Features are all well and good, but users demand reliable, well-performing software too.

I took a deeper interest in cloud operations tooling and began to notice that it was more than just the tools that drove success.

The right mindset and practices were critical.

How I started advocating SRE practices

I previously worked as an IT manager at a healthcare company where I eventually became an operations director responsible for technology, people, and property.

After my startup stint, I returned to my previous employer to handle software vendor relations, as well as help prepare the business for imminent changes in the market.

The company dealt with many issues during its digital transformation to the cloud. This experience taught me that a lot more education is needed around software reliability.

Our vendors were shifting from an on-premises to a SaaS model but not successfully providing reliable or performant versions.

This is when I became an advocate for DevOps and SRE.

I started the precursor to this site as a way to educate the engineers within those vendor organizations and have not looked back since.

Finding ways to improve SRE implementations

I am constantly working with collaborators to find unique ways to make SRE more effective as a discipline.

We are developing a tool to help SRE managers and their ICs plan the team’s mid-to-long-range technical capabilities.

It draws on design thinking principles and is based on the scientific jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework.

This is our story so far. We would love to hear yours.

Open to new content contributions

We always welcome contributions from people aligned with our mission to enhance SRE work through better practices and team development.

If you have an interest in organizational design or change management and happen to have software operations knowledge, please get in touch.

I especially hope to give an avenue for knowledge to pour in from all over the world including Asia, Africa, and more.