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SRE & Operations Overview

Site Reliability Engineering practices and operational guidelines for Burdenoff products.

SRE Principles​

Reliability​

  • Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
  • Service Level Indicators (SLIs)
  • Error budgets
  • Incident management

Scalability​

  • Horizontal scaling
  • Load balancing
  • Database optimization
  • Caching strategies

Performance​

  • Response time targets
  • Resource optimization
  • Performance monitoring
  • Capacity planning

Service Level Objectives (SLOs)​

Availability​

  • Target: 99.9% uptime
  • Measurement: Successful requests / Total requests
  • Error Budget: 0.1% (43.8 minutes/month)

Latency​

  • P50: < 100ms
  • P95: < 500ms
  • P99: < 1000ms

Error Rate​

  • Target: < 0.1%
  • Measurement: Failed requests / Total requests

Monitoring Stack​

Metrics Collection​

  • Prometheus: Time-series metrics
  • OpenTelemetry: Distributed tracing
  • Azure Monitor: Cloud metrics

Visualization​

  • Grafana: Dashboards
  • Azure Dashboard: Cloud overview
  • Custom dashboards: Product-specific

Alerting​

  • Alert Manager: Alert routing
  • PagerDuty: On-call management
  • Slack: Team notifications
  • Email: Critical alerts

Key Metrics​

Application Metrics​

- Request rate (requests/second)
- Error rate (errors/second)
- Request duration (p50, p95, p99)
- Active connections
- Queue depth

System Metrics​

- CPU utilization
- Memory usage
- Disk I/O
- Network throughput
- Database connections

Business Metrics​

- Active users
- API calls per product
- Data storage usage
- Feature usage
- Conversion rates

Incident Management​

Severity Levels​

SEV 1 - Critical​

  • Complete service outage
  • Data loss or corruption
  • Security breach
  • Response: Immediate (< 5 minutes)

SEV 2 - High​

  • Major feature unavailable
  • Significant performance degradation
  • Response: < 15 minutes

SEV 3 - Medium​

  • Minor feature issue
  • Performance issues
  • Response: < 1 hour

SEV 4 - Low​

  • Cosmetic issues
  • Minor bugs
  • Response: Next business day

Incident Response Process​

  1. Detect: Monitoring alerts or user reports
  2. Acknowledge: On-call engineer responds
  3. Investigate: Identify root cause
  4. Mitigate: Apply temporary fix
  5. Resolve: Implement permanent solution
  6. Post-mortem: Document lessons learned

On-Call Rotation​

Schedule​

  • Primary: 1 week rotation
  • Secondary: Backup on-call
  • Escalation: Team lead → CTO

Responsibilities​

  • Monitor alerts
  • Respond to incidents
  • Update status page
  • Document actions
  • Handoff to next on-call

Tools​

  • PagerDuty for alerts
  • Slack for communication
  • Runbooks for procedures
  • Status page for updates

Runbooks​

Common operational procedures documented at:

Deployment Strategy​

Blue-Green Deployment​

  1. Deploy new version (green)
  2. Run smoke tests
  3. Switch traffic gradually
  4. Monitor metrics
  5. Rollback if issues

Canary Deployment​

  1. Deploy to 5% of traffic
  2. Monitor for 15 minutes
  3. Increase to 25%
  4. Monitor for 15 minutes
  5. Full rollout or rollback

Rollback Procedure​

# Kubernetes rollback
kubectl rollout undo deployment/[product]

# Helm rollback
helm rollback [product] [revision]

Capacity Planning​

Traffic Forecasting​

  • Historical data analysis
  • Growth projections
  • Seasonal patterns
  • Marketing campaigns

Resource Planning​

  • CPU and memory requirements
  • Database storage
  • Network bandwidth
  • Cache capacity

Scaling Triggers​

autoscaling:
  minReplicas: 3
  maxReplicas: 20
  targetCPUUtilization: 70
  targetMemoryUtilization: 80

Database Operations​

Backup Strategy​

  • Frequency: Daily automated backups
  • Retention: 30 days
  • Testing: Monthly restore tests
  • Location: Azure Blob Storage

Maintenance Windows​

  • Schedule: Sundays 2:00 AM - 4:00 AM UTC
  • Notification: 48 hours advance notice
  • Duration: < 2 hours
  • Rollback: Available if needed

Performance Optimization​

  • Query optimization
  • Index management
  • Connection pooling
  • Read replicas

Security Operations​

Security Monitoring​

  • Failed login attempts
  • Unusual API patterns
  • Data access audits
  • Privilege escalation

Incident Response​

  • Security incident playbook
  • Breach notification procedure
  • Forensics and investigation
  • Remediation steps

Compliance​

  • Regular security audits
  • Vulnerability scanning
  • Penetration testing
  • Compliance reports

Disaster Recovery​

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)​

  • Critical services: 1 hour
  • Important services: 4 hours
  • Standard services: 24 hours

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)​

  • Database: 15 minutes
  • File storage: 1 hour
  • Logs: 24 hours

DR Testing​

  • Quarterly DR drills
  • Annual full DR test
  • Documentation updates
  • Team training

Next Steps​