97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 77. The Forward-Deployed SRE

Johnny Boursiquot

Salesforce/Heroku

SRE teams are often independent of any other and operate with their own objectives and mandates within the broader engineering organization. However, the embedded model is another approach that isn’t often talked about, but that can be effective when seeking SRE adoption or investing in ongoing operational excellence. In Chapter 76, I discussed the need for the fdSRE (forward-deployed SRE) as a manifestation of the embedded model. Here, we discuss the attributes that make a great fdSRE.

As with SRE, the fdSRE is a competent but operationally minded software engineer. As they engineer software, they think about how it will run in production, how it will behave under load, what configuration will look like, what security and/or compliance will look like, how it will regain a consistent state when restarted, and how it will be observed.

The fdSRE takes on more ownership. As an embedded engineer in another team, they are concerned about the health of their host team but also about the broader mission of the SRE organization with which they have a dotted-line reporting relationship. In the total ownership model, where teams own the whole stack, the impetus to solve a higher-order problem that affects everyone can be lacking. The fdSRE must learn to build relationships and engender trust to identify solvable problems ...