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An Overview Of Chaos Engineering

Shiwani Sharma — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:06:27 +0000

What is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos Engineering is a technique used to assess the dependability of software systems by introducing controlled disorder into them. Organizations can leverage chaos engineering by establishing backup elements or procedures to ensure that the software functions smoothly during unexpected issues. The primary goal of chaos engineering is to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an architectural system, enabling the entire team to evaluate performance in a production environment. Chaos engineering is derived from a concept called chaos theory and focuses on the immediate behavior of systems. It is straightforward to use, offers automation, and supports various configurations.

Definition of Chaos Engineering as per Wikipedia:

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system’s ability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

According to Robert L. Devaney, to classify a dynamical system as chaotic, it must have these properties:

It must be sensitive to initial conditions.
It must be topologically transitive.
It must have dense periodic orbits.

Image Credit: https://www.dynatrace.com/news/blog/what-is-chaos-engineering/

Principles of Chaos Engineering:

Automation: It helps ensure that experiments are repeatable and well-managed. Chaos engineers consider automation essential for conducting experiments regularly. Automation principles play an important role in chaos engineering, as it permits the repeatable, predictable, safe, and controlled injection of chaos into the system. Many chaos engineering tools, such as Chaos Toolkit and Chaos Monkey, are crucial for this purpose.

Monitoring and Observability: This principle is crucial as it collects data during chaos experiments and aids in assessing the impact of failures. These principles help organizations learn and improve the performance and reliability of their system. First, let’s discuss the monitoring principle, the process of analyzing and collecting data from a system in real-time to gain insights into its behavior, health, and performance. Monitoring plays an important role in chaos engineering as it allows for quick detection of experiment execution, among other things. Now, let’s discuss observability, a way to debug and understand a system by checking out its behavior and internal state, even when there is no clear monitoring.

Safety: Chaos engineering should be carried out with safety considerations in mind. In case of failure or catastrophic losses, chaos engineers have the capability to roll back any changes. Safety is one of the important principles of chaos engineering, required to manage experiments in a safe, controlled manner, so that the organization can identify weaknesses in their system, upgrade the overall system, and manage any losses and interference effectively.

Building a Hypothesis: Chaos engineers start by constructing hypotheses, which guide the chaos experiment. These hypotheses revolve around how a system should perform under adverse and typical conditions. When building a hypothesis for a chaos engineering experiment, it is important to define the goals, income, and variables to test. When introducing chaos, it is important to write a clear statement that narrates what you expect.

Controlled Experiments: Controlled chaos experiments involve introducing specific forms of chaos to measure various factors, such as server failures and network latency. It is a scientific investigation where researchers have to handle many variables to ensure that they carefully control many dependent variables. The main aim of the principle of controlled experiments is to establish the relationship between many variables and some irregular variables. In this principle of controlled experiments, researchers utilize a control group and other experimental groups to identify differences and draw correlations about the effect of manipulated variables.

Post-experiment Analysis: After a successful chaos experiment, the entire team’s task is to examine the data collected and determine how the system will react when subjected to injected failures. This is an important and challenging phase where you can assess deep learning and results from organized chaos experiments.

Benefits of Chaos Engineering:

Organizations derive several benefits from chaos engineering, including:

Enhanced User Experience: Chaos engineering ensures that users have the best experience, even when encountering errors, ultimately improving the overall system’s performance. Chaos engineering helps identify weaknesses in your system, resulting in less downtime, fewer outages, and an enhanced user experience. It also helps identify potential problems during deployments and software updates, which, when addressed by the team, enhances the user experience.

Cost Savings: System failures and outages can be expensive in terms of operational expenses, lost revenue, and customer churn. Chaos engineering helps mitigate these costs by decreasing financial losses stemming from customer dissatisfaction and lost revenue. It helps organizations optimize resources and identify under- or over-equipped resources, reducing irrelevant expenses.

Stimulates Innovation: Chaos engineering identifies structural flaws and designs improvements in software systems, fostering innovation. It supports the team in finding weaknesses and losses in the organization and helps uncover areas that need improvement and innovation to make the system more resilient and robust.

Cultural Shift: Chaos engineering promotes continuous learning, regular development, and experimentation between operations and development teams. The cultural shift emphasizes self-service, automation, and the reduction of manual mistakes, enabling faster and more valid testing. Chaos engineering serves as a vehicle for the team to share experiences, best practices, and knowledge, promoting a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous learning.

Improved Resilience: Chaos engineering identifies system weaknesses and enables teams to strengthen the system against unexpected issues.

Efficient Problem Detection: Chaos engineering helps identify and address problems quickly, reducing downtime. This helps organizations find and address problems that arise early, improve system resilience, and build a more robust and reliable system.

Conclusion: Chaos Engineering is a technique used to assess the dependability of software systems by introducing controlled disorder into them. The primary goal of chaos engineering is to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in an architectural system, enabling the entire team to evaluate performance in a production environment. In this blog article, you will be able to learn in-depth about the principles and benefits that occur through chaos engineering.

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SRE Role In 2024

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 04:18:26 +0000

What is an SRE? (Site Reliability Engineering)

SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It has many more similarities to DevOps. Site reliability engineering was inaugurated by Ben TreynorSloss and the idea of SRE came from Google Engineering. The engineer who is working on Google has written SRE. There are two terms and components which are very valuable for SRE are automation and standardization.

They always want to work in two ways either to automate operations tasks. It helps the team for its movability means if a team wants to move from a traditional approach to IT operations to a cloud-native method, then the SRE supports their team for that. For enhancing the integrity of software and the infrastructure which operates it and SRE furnishes incentive and expensive input.

What do SRE do? (Roles and Responsibilities)

In simple terms, a site reliability engineering work is to shared goal, overlapping skillset, consistent tools and have common basis and development team and SRE team has a very slightly bridge. The term Reliability in SRE means, it has a specific part in the organizations and the lifecycle of Software Development. 3S are very important in

Roles and Responsibilities of Site Reliability Engineering

The site reliability engineer gets the benefit from both the teams the software development and the IT operations. While working with these two teams takes less time and focuses on more time for generating new components and services.

Image Credit: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/devops/articles/site-reliability-engineer/#lg=1&slide=0

In the above image you can see some point that are the benefits of Site Reliability Engineer and some of these we have mentioned below as well.

Its role is to support the team

SRE develops the software to support the team and operation. Site reliability engineers create a tool that helps and solve any problem in the delivery of software.

Performing analyses that is post-incident

The SRE team needs to maintain each and every one between two important teams ( software developers and IT professionals) performing post-incident analyses and have to put up with the effort on their knowledge and it also boosts the dependability of their service.

Their responsibility is to rectify their problems

SRE spends time fixing support escalation cases. If you want to see fewer problems in production then it must take more attention to SRE operation because somewhere in a whole organization Site reliability engineer team consist of several parts of IT and engineering.

Documentations & Knowledge Sharing

One of the important role of SRE is to make and maintain documentations, best practices and it’s also essential to share the knowledge across the entire team to get the culture of learning and by this way you will see the improvement in work and enhancing the knowledge in the entire team.

The main role and responsibility of SRE is to focus on the actual requirement of the customer and when the customer wants to use the services and the platform, they can use them easily.

Benefit of Site reliability engineer

Image Credit: https://www.impelsys.com/blog/why-site-reliability-engineering-is-critical-for-any-organization/

Some of the useful and important benefit of site reliability engineer (SRE) are as follow:

It takes additional time for developing values

If the organization has a system that can easily find the error and solve it and this is beneficial for the development staff because they don’t have to invest their time on the issue, they focus on the new characteristics and improvements. SRE utilizes the knowledge of IT staff from productivity and creating value by having less distraction. SRE encourages the staff to provide the values of their good work in terms of both quantity and quality.

It satisfies the customer expectations

SRE targets are on the satisfaction of the client or customer. 4 elements are important for SRE that satisfies the customer is SLA (Service Level Agreement) SLO (Service Level Objective) SLI (Service Level Indicator) SRE provides more services, many functional products and the services are provided on time, that’s why the client is more satisfied with the work.

Reducing the bugs and the issues

The SRE team has to focus on solving the issues that are arising rather than formulating a code because solving the problem will satisfy the customer and it is more important to create a code.

Cost Efficiency

By maximize the presentation and decreasing the downtime, the Site Reliability engineer practices in the final analysis to make a donation to save the cost for the organization.

Regularly Improvement

It’s essential to do the continuous monitoring for the site reliability engineers, they inspire to do more and new learning and uplift you from the failures, leading to ongoing improvements and prevents you from the problems that may happens again.

Future for SRE Role

As we know SRE is going famous daily, so every site reliability engineer who has good knowledge and much qualified have reasonable salaries it approaches how to use the business. If any aspirant wants to make future on SRE then they have to take full knowledge about it and so the attention on future development and related alternative. Now-a-days in the technical industries SRE engineering jobs role is in trending or in a high demand. In USA this role is the second most promising and important job. As per the report send in LinkedIn, the salary criteria for this role is:

The starting salary or basis salary is $200,000, Rate of Job Opening : 1500 and more than 75%

Conclusion: SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It also represents a transformative approach that transcends traditional boundaries between development and operations. SRE empowers organizations to build and maintain highly scalable, payable and efficient system.

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An Overview Of Platform Engineering

Shiwani Sharma — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 18:25:29 +0000

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.

Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other staeholders.

Platform engineers bring the necessary tools for deploying and running applications and formalize their usage across the entire team. In other terms, platform engineering encompasses everything that is a part of the application’s non-functional requirements.

A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that supports the DevOps of software applications. Nowadays, platform engineering is becoming a trend because it guarantees to provide the best experience for developers and speeds up the product team. They also help developers work more efficiently by implementing CI/CD pipelines and configuring IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to automate cloud resources.

Image Credit: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/02/13/setting-the-stage-for-platform-engineering/

The above images show how both platform engineering and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are properly suited for the development team. Once these tools receive more features, application developers must work on these features. Subsequently, both the platform engineering team and the Infrastructure as Code team collaborate.

Who is a Platform Engineer?

A platform engineer’s responsibility is to build the tools needed in the development and operations process for organizing, executing & managing the infrastructure. These engineers also work at the junction of IT operations & software development, concentrating on developing an automated workflow to help the develeopers, sysadmins, security teams and other stakeholders with a se

Platform engineers have to work with software developers, stakeholders, and system administrators to get to know their needs and secure them to fulfill their needs with the help of tools and platforms.

The platform engineer’s responsibilities depends upon the need of the organization, and some of the common responsibilities may include:

IMAGE CREDIT: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/it-careers-skills/articles/platform-engineer-job-role/#lg=1&slide=0

Responsibilities Of a Platform Engineer

A Platform engineer have several responsibilities. He will discuss challenges with the developers and then act upon their insights to build internal tools and platforms.

They have to design, do testing & deployment of the software.
They do automate the application deployment process.
They are mostly involved in building internal developer portals (IDPs). IDPs provide a curated set of tools, capabilities and processes.
Platform engineer is involved in maintaining and updating infrastructure and applications
Platform engineers have to collaborate and work with other team like Operations, Development & Security to provide flow going integrations.
At the time of any issue and problems , platform engineer try to solve it.
They have to keep up with the latest trends in the industry.

Principles Of Platform Engineering

Some of the Key principles of Platform engineering are shared below.

Developer-Centric Philosophy(Empowering the Developers)

One of the most important principle and the main reason for the existence of the platform engineering teams is to make the life of developers easy. They collaborate with the developers, understand their pain-points and then work to build a frictionless internal developer portals (IDPs), that is an internal tool or platform to solve some of the developer challenges within.

Building Resilience and Anti-fragility

Another core principle for Platform enigneering is Resilience. In case of major issues or chaos, a modern Platform team not only survives, but thrives.Antifragility takes it a step further, transforming disruptions into opportunities for improvement. Modern platform engineering employs strategies such as redundancy, graceful degradation, and fault tolerance to build systems that flourish under pressure.

Automation

As the name says automation principles mean to automate manual and repetitive tasks like testing, evaluating, deployment, etc. It also enhances to decrease human mistakes, speeds up software delivery & improves the efficiency. Automation is the fundamental principle of platform engineering that consist the utilization of scripting and technology to perform the repetitive tasks and streamline process.

Standardization

Standardization maintain the consistency, helps to facilitates alliance across the team, decreases elaborateness. Standardization also provide the best practices, and coding structure. Other important principle of platform engineering, it helps to assure the reliability, consistency for organizing infrastructure and help the team of software development. To configure the standardized security help to protect against vulnerabilities and assure all the problem related to industry regulations.

Modularity

The principle of designing and making a software platforms is nothing but a collection of loosely coupled and independent code modules.Here each module serves a specific purpose which can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. The principle of Modularity enhances flexibility, reusability, and scalability, allowing for easier maintenance, upgrades, and adaption to changing requirements.

Scalability

Another key principle of platform engineering is Scalability. It can be defined as the ability of a platform or a tool to handle increased workloads, traffic, users, and data volumes without giving up on the performance.Platform engineering helps develop a scalable architecture or infrastructure that can scale down or up efficiently.

Security

Platform Engineers are also responsible to secure developer code, infrastructure ,data and other resources. Implementing robust security measures can protect the platform, application, and user data from breaches, any unauthorized and unwanted access, and other vulnerabilities.

Collaboration

The platform engineering process also emphasizes on the collaboration between Platform engineers, Developers, Operation teams, and other stakeholders involved in the project.

Skills Required For a Platform Engineer

If you want to become a successful Platform engineer, it’s important to have some key skills and some of the common skills are communication skills, analytical skills, innovation skills, collaborative teamwork skills & the last not least is trouble solving skills.

Good coding skills
Creativity and problem-solving skills
Analytical skills
Excellent Communication skills:Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills to plainly and concisely articulate technical concepts.
Research and innovation skills
Good at cross team collaboration
Working under tight timelines and ability to perform and deliver

Benefits Of Platform Engineering

Increased Efficiency

The entire process of platform engineering is automated, focusing on automation. Before the platform engineer’s involvement, the work was manually managing the cloud infrastructure and creating CI/CD pipelines, which consumed significant time and resulted in numerous errors. Therefore, the platform engineer enables more efficient work with fewer errors.

Cost Optimization

Many platform engineers handle cloud services with a “pay as you use” model, which means organizations only pay for the services they use. Platform engineering facilitates cost optimization through automation, efficient resource allocation, and payment based on actual usage of cloud services. This approach helps organizations save money while ensuring reliable and scalable applications.

Improved Security

Platform engineering employs several techniques to enhance security, including monitoring and logging systems to detect suspicious activities, providing security training and attention, securing container environments, and ensuring the security of code pipelines and applications.

Increased velocity

Platform engineering exponentially cuts down on the time it takes for developers to get up and running in the cloud.

Conclusion

There is no denying fact that Platform engineering is the latest buzz in the technology space and the future also looks bright. The image below shows Gartner’s Hype cycle for Emerging Tech for 2022, and Platform engineerings seems to be there fo rat-leasst next 5 years or more.

IMAGE CREDIT : https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-the-2022-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies

So if someone is looking to pursue a career in Platform engineer then they can definitely choose it to make a successful and rewarding career option out of it. This role is nowdays becoming moe and more popular and many organizations gobally are hiring Platform engineers for the enhancement and company growth. It is a combination of tools and technology that decreases the mental pressure on individual contributors, enabling self-service for developers.

Hence we can conclude on the note that the demand for Platform engineers is rising and Platform engineering as a concept is here to stay for long.

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