Interlink’s Site Reliability Engineering Solution:
Building DevOps Workflow Resilience

As people continue to flock online to go about their day-to-day business – to shop, work and communicate, consistent delivery of super-resilient, cloud-based applications and software have become an imperative for digital-first enterprises like never before. 

DevOps has empowered businesses with the necessary agility to maintain continuous delivery pipelines, keep pace with their competition and meet customer expectations. Dev needs to release software fast, Ops need to avoid failures in production. 

Releasing new software at speed brings with it the risk of breakages along the way. Observability can be obscured by the number of ‘moving parts’ involved in DevOps workflows, the array of tools in play and the volume of alerts and metrics generated at every stage of the process. The practice of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) addresses these challenges and helps to underwrite reliable and successful releases.

Interlink’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Capabilities

Interlink’s SRE solution centres on enhancing observability - enabling teams to understand, manage and improve performance. Achieved by integrations to monitoring, orchestration, provisioning and ITSM tools, the solution presents a single-pane-of-glass view across DevOps workflows - clearly highlighting issues and how changes might impact on reliability.
 

Service-Level Objectives (SLO) are a key element of Service-Level Agreements (SLA) between service providers and customers; a means of measuring performance and whether a system is meeting the agreed levels of availability.
 

The Interlink solution gives users the capability to define and monitor SLOs – driven top-down by Service Models which reveal systems dependencies. Service Modelling enables teams to track the key signifiers of availability, what we call Service Facts. Service Facts drive real-time and early warnings of deviations in availability (grouped according to service, application or technology.)
 

A key concern of SRE teams is the Error Budget - the maximum amount of time a system is allowed to fail before impacting on SLAs/users. The Interlink solution delivers insights into whether a system is meeting the required levels of performance and availability – providing clear and objective metrics and reporting on downtime, service degradation, outages and more.

Incident response is a major part of maintaining uptime and assuring reliable services. Interlink’s Service Outage Room equips teams with a chat channel, a place to efficiently see where issues are and handle incident response and communications across the whole incident lifecycle.