Setting the context for practical SRE

It is appropriate to give some background information for this new engineering discipline to enhance readability. SRE is a quickly emerging and evolving field of study and research. The market and mind shares of the SRE field are consistently climbing. Businesses, having decisively understood the strategic significance of SRE, are keen to formulate and firm up a workable strategy. 

Characterizing the next-generation software systems 

Software applications are increasingly complicated yet sophisticated. Highly integrated systems are the new norm these days. Enterprise-grade applications ought to be seamlessly integrated with several third-party software components running in distributed and disparate systems. Increasingly, software applications are made out of a number of interactive, transformative, and disruptive services in an ad hoc manner on an as-needed basis. Multi-channel, multimedia, multi-modal, multi-device, and multi-tenant applications are becoming pervasive and persuasive. There are also enterprise, cloud, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, cognitive, and embedded applications hosted in virtual and containerized environments. Then, there are industry-specific and vertical applications (energy, retail, government, telecommunication, supply chain, utility, healthcare, banking, and insurance, automobiles, avionics, and robotics) being designed and delivered via cloud infrastructures.

There are software packages, homegrown software, turnkey solutions, scientific, and technical computing services, and customizable and configurable software applications to meet distinct business requirements. In short, there are operational, transactional, and analytical applications running on private, public, and hybrid clouds. With the exponential growth of connected devices, smart sensors, and actuators, fog gateways, smartphones, microcontrollers, and single board computers (SBCs), the software enabled data analytics and proximate moves to edge devices to accomplish real-time data capture, processing, decision-making, and action.

We are destined to move towards real-time analytics and applications. Thus, it is clear that software is purposefully penetrative, participative, and productive. Largely, it is quite a software-intensive world.

Characterizing the next-generation hardware systems 

Similar to the quickly growing software engineering field, hardware engineering is also on the fast track. These days, there are clusters, grids, and clouds of IT infrastructures. There are powerful appliances, cloud-in-a-box options, hyper-converged infrastructures, and commodity servers for hosting IT platforms and business applications. The physical machines are touted as bare metal servers. The virtual versions of the physical machines are the virtual machines and containers. We are heading toward the era of hardware infrastructure programming. That is, closed, inflexible, and difficult to manage and maintain bare-metal servers are being partitioned into a number of virtual machines and containers that are highly flexible, open, easily manageable, and replaceable, not to mention quickly provisionable, independently deployable, and horizontally scalable. The infrastructure partitioning and provisioning gets sped up with scores of automated tools to enable the rapid delivery of software applications. The rewarding aspects of continuous integration, deployment, and delivery are being facilitated through a combination of containers, microservices, configuration management solutions, DevOps tools, and Continuous Integration (CI) platforms.

Moving toward hybrid IT and distributed computing

Worldwide institutions, individuals, and innovators are keenly embracing cloud technology with all its clarity and confidence. With the faster maturity and stability of cloud environments, there is a distinct growth in building and delivering cloud-native applications, and there are viable articulations and approaches to readily make cloud native software. Traditional and legacy software applications are being meticulously modernized and moved to cloud environments to reap the originally envisaged benefits of the cloud idea. Cloud software engineering is one hot area, drawing the attention of many software engineers across the globe. There are public, private, and hybrid clouds. Recently, we have heard more about edge/fog clouds. Still, there are traditional IT environments that are being considered in the hybrid world.

There are development teams all over the world working in multiple time zones. Due to the diversity and multiplicity of IT systems and business applications, distributed applications are being touted as the way forward. That is, the various components of any software application are being distributed across multiple locations for enabling redundancy enabled high availability. Fault-tolerance, less latency, independent software development, and no vendor lock-in are being given as the reason for the realm of distributed applications. Accordingly, software programming models are being adroitly tweaked so that they deliver optimal performance in the era of distributed and decentralized applications. Multiple development teams working in multiple time zones across the globe have become the new norm in this hybrid world of on-shore and off-shore development.

With the big-data era upon us, we need the most usable and uniquely distributed computing paradigm through the dynamic pool of commoditized servers and inexpensive computers. With the exponential growth of connected devices, the days of device clouds are not too far away. That is, distributed and decentralized devices are bound to be clubbed together in large numbers to form ad hoc and application-specific cloud environments for data capture, ingestion, pre-processing, and analytics. Thus, there is no doubt that the future belongs to distributed computing. The fully matured and stabilized centralized computing is unsustainable due to the need for web-scale applications. Also, the next-generation internet is the internet of digitized things, connected devices, and microservices.

Envisioning the digital era

There are a bunch of digitization and edge technologies bringing forth a number of business innovations and improvisations. As enterprises are embracing these technologies, the ensuring era is being touted as the digital transformation and intelligence era. This section helps in telling you about all that needs to be changed through the absorption of these pioneering and path-breaking technologies and tools. 

The field of information and communication technology (ICT) is rapidly growing with the arrival of scores of pioneering technologies, and this trend is expediently and elegantly automating multiple business tasks. Then, the maturity and stability of orchestration technologies and tools is bound to club together multiple automated jobs and automate the aggregated ones. We will now discuss the latest trends and transitions happening in the ICT space.

Due to the heterogeneity and multiplicity of software technologies such as programming languages, development models, data formats, and protocols, software development and operational complexities are growing continuously. There are several breakthrough mechanisms to develop and run enterprise-grade software in an agile and adroit fashion. There came a number of complexity mitigation and rapid development techniques for producing production-grade software in a swift and smart manner. The leverage of "divide and conquer" and "the separation of crosscutting concerns" techniques is being consistently experimented with and developers are being encouraged to develop risk-free and futuristic software services. The potential concepts of abstraction, encapsulation, virtualization, and other compartmentalization methods are being invoked to reduce the software production pain. In addition, there are performance engineering and enhancement aspects that are getting the utmost consideration from software architects. Thus, software development processes, best practices, design patterns, evaluation metrics, key guidelines, integrated platforms, enabling frameworks, simplifying templates, and programming models are gaining immense significance in this software-defined world.

Thus, there are several breakthrough technologies for digital innovations, disruptions, and transformations. Primarily, the IoT paradigm generates a lot of multi-structured digital data and the famous artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as machine and deep learning, enables the extrication of actionable insights out of the digital data. Transitioning raw digital data into information, knowledge, and wisdom is the key differentiator for implementing digitally transformed and intelligent societies. Cloud IT is being positioned as the best-in-class IT environment for enabling and expediting the digital transformation. 

With digitization and edge technologies, our everyday items become digitized to join in with mainstream computing. That is, we will be encountering trillions of digitized entities and elements in the years ahead. With the faster stability and maturity of the IoT, cyber physical systems (CPS), ambient intelligence (AmI), and pervasive computing technologies and tools, we are being bombarded with innumerable connected devices, instruments, machines, drones, robots, utilities, consumer electronics, wares, equipment, and appliances. Now, with the unprecedented interest and investment in AI (machine and deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing), algorithms and approaches, and IoT device data (collaborations, coordination, correlation, and corroboration) are meticulously captured, cleansed, and crunched to extricate actionable insights/digital intelligence in time. There are several promising, potential, and proven digital technologies emerging and evolving quickly in synchronization, with a variety of data mining, processing, and analytics. These innovations and disruptions eventually lead to digital transformation. Thus, digitization and edge technologies in association with digital intelligence algorithms and tools lead to the realization and sustenance of digitally transformed environments (smarter hotels, homes, hospitals, and so on). We can easily anticipate and articulate digitally transformed countries, counties, and cities in the years to come with pioneering and groundbreaking digital technologies and tools.  

The cloud service paradigm

The cloud era is setting in and settling steadily. The aiding processes, platforms, policies, procedures, practices, and patterns are being framed and firmed up by IT professionals and professors, to tend toward the cloud. The following sections give the necessary details for our esteemed readers.  

The cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructures are gaining immense popularity these days. Cloud applications are of two primary types:

1. Cloud-enabled: The currently running massive and monolithic applications get modernized and migrated to cloud environments to reap the distinct benefits of the cloud paradigm
2. Cloud-native: This is all about designing, developing, debugging, delivering, and deploying applications directly on cloud environments by intrinsically leveraging the non-functional capabilities of cloud environments

The current and conventional applications that are hosted and running on various IT environments are being meticulously modernized and migrated to standardized and multifaceted cloud environments to reap all the originally expressed benefits of cloud paradigm. Besides enabling business-critical, legacy, and monolithic applications to be cloud-ready, there are endeavors for designing, developing, debugging, deploying, and delivering enterprise-class applications in cloud environments, harvesting all of the unique characteristics of cloud infrastructure and platforms. These applications natively absorb the various characteristics of cloud infrastructures and act adaptively. There is microservices architecture (MSA) for designing next-generation enterprise-class applications. MSA is being deftly leveraged to enable massive applications to be partitioned into a collection of decoupled, easily manageable, and fine-grained microservices.

With the decisive adoption of cloud technologies and tools, every component of enterprise IT is being readied to be delivered as a service. The cloud idea has really and rewardingly brought in a stream of innovations, disruptions, and transformations for the IT industry. The days of IT as a Service (ITaaS) will soon become a reality, due to a stream of noteworthy advancements and accomplishments in the cloud space. 

The ubiquity of cloud platforms and infrastructures 

The other key aspect is to have reliable, available, scalable, and secure IT environments (cloud and non-cloud). We talked about producing versatile software packages and libraries. We also talked about setting up and sustaining appropriate IT infrastructures for successfully running various kinds of IT and business applications. Increasingly, the traditional data centers and server farms are being modernized through the smart application of cloud-enablement technologies and tools. The cloud idea establishes and enforces IT rationalization, the heightened utilization of IT resources, and optimization. There is a growing number of massive public cloud environments (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google cloud, IBM cloud, and Oracle cloud) that are encompassing thousands of commodity and high-end server machines, storage appliance arrays, and networking components to accommodate and accomplish the varying IT needs of the whole world. Government organizations, business behemoths, various service providers, and institutions are empowering their own IT centers into private cloud environments. Then, on an as-needed basis, private clouds are beginning to match the various capabilities of public clouds to meet specific requirements. In short, cloud environments are being positioned as the one-stop IT solution for our professional, social, and personal IT requirements.

The cloud is becoming pervasive with the unique contributions of many players from the IT industry, worldwide academic institutions, and research labs. We have plenty of private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. The surging popularity of fog/edge computing leads to the formation of fog/edge device clouds, which are contributing immensely to produce people-centric and real-time applications. The fog or edge device computing is all about leveraging scores of connected and capable devices to form a kind of purpose-specific as well as agnostic device cloud to collect, cleanse and crunch sensor, actuator, device, machine, instrument, and equipment poly-structured and real-time data emanating from all sorts of physical, mechanical, and electrical systems on the ground. With the projected billions of connected devices, the future beckons and bats for device clusters and clouds. Definitely, the cloud movement has penetrated every industry and the IT phenomenon is redefined and resuscitated by the roaring success of the cloud. Soon, cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructures will be everywhere. IT is all set to become the fifth social utility. The pertinent and paramount challenge is how to bring forth deeper and decisive automation in the cloud IT space.

The need for deeply automated and adaptive cloud centers with clouds emerging as the most flexible, futuristic, and fabulous IT environments to host and run IT and business workloads, there is a rush for bringing as much automation as possible to speed up the process of cloud migration, software deployment and delivery, cloud monitoring, measurement and management, cloud integration and orchestration, cloud governance and security, and so on. There are several trends and transitions happening simultaneously in the IT space to realize these goals.

The growing software penetration and participation

Marc Andreessen famously penned the article Why software is eating the world several years ago. Today, we widely hear, read, and even sometimes experience buzzwords such as software-defined, compute, storage, and networking. Software is everywhere and gets embedded in everything. Software has, unquestionably, been the principal business automation and acceleration enabler. Nowadays, on its memorable and mesmerizing journey, software is penetrating into every tangible thing (physical, mechanical, and electrical) in our everyday environments to transform them into connected entities, digitized things, smart objects, and sentient materials. For example, every advanced car today has been sagaciously stuffed with millions of lines of code to be elegantly adaptive in its operations, outputs, and offerings.

Precisely speaking, the ensuing era sets the stage for having knowledge-filled, situation-aware, event-driven, service-oriented, cloud-hosted, process-optimized, and people-centric applications. These applications need to exhibit a few extra capabilities. That is, the next-generation software systems innately have to be reliable, rewarding, and reactive ones. Also, we need to arrive at competent processes, platforms, patterns, procedures, and practices for creating and sustaining high-quality systems. There are widely available non-functional requirements (NFRs), quality of service (QoS), and quality of experience (QoE) attributes, such as availability, scalability, modifiability, sustainability, security, portability, and simplicity. The challenge for every IT professional lies in producing software that unambiguously and intrinsically guarantees all the NFRs.

Agile application design: We have come across a number of agile software development methodologies. We read about extreme and pair programming, scrum, and so on. However, for the agile design of enterprise-grade applications, the stability of MSA is to activate and accelerate the application design. 

Accelerated software programming: As we all know, enterprise-scale and customer-facing software applications are being developed speedily nowadays, with the faster maturity of potential agile programming methods, processes, platforms, and frameworks. There are other initiatives and inventions enabling speedier software development. There are component-based software assemblies, and service-oriented software engineering is steadily growing. There are scores of state-of-the-art tools consistently assisting component and service-based application-building phenomena. On the other hand, the software engineering aspect gets simplified and streamlined through the configuration, customization, and composition-centric application generation methods. 

Automated software deployment through DevOps: There are multiple reasons for software programs to be running well in the developer's machine but not so well in other environments, including production environments. There are different editions, versions, and releases of software packages, platforms, programming languages, and frameworks. Coming to the running software is suites across different environments. There is a big disconnect between developers and operation teams due to constant friction between development and operating environments. 

Further on, with agile programming techniques and tips, software applications get constructed quickly, but their integration, testing, building, delivery, and deployment aspects are not automated. Therefore, concepts such as DevOps, NoOps, and AIOps have gained immense prominence and dominance to bring in several automation enabling IT administrators. That is, these new arrivals have facilitated a seamless and spontaneous synchronization between software design, development, debugging, deployment, delivery and decommissioning processes, and people. The emergence of configuration management tools and cloud orchestration platforms enables IT infrastructure programming. That is, the term Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is facilitating the DevOps concept. That is, faster provisioning of infrastructure resources through configuration files, and the deployment of software on those infrastructure modules, is the core and central aspect of the flourishing concept of DevOps. 

This is the prime reason why the concept of DevOps has started flourishing these days. This is quite a new idea that's gaining a lot of momentum within enterprise and cloud IT teams. Companies embrace this new cultural change with the leverage of multiple toolsets for Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment (CD). Precisely speaking, besides producing enterprise-grade software applications and platforms, realizing and sustaining virtualized/containerized infrastructures with the assistance of automated tools to ensure continuous and guaranteed delivery of software-enabled and IT-assisted business capabilities to mankind is the need of the hour.