Our Approach: The Resiliency & SRE Maturity Model
Resiliency & SRE maturity comes in stages that build on one another to fully optimize the proper business outcomes. It touches the other areas of cloud management including DevOps, SecOps, and Application Modernization. Below shows the stages to fully adopting Vertical Relevance’s SRE Maturity Model. While every organization we work with is unique and presents its own business challenges to solve, a commonality between most of our clients is the requirement on how to have a well-defined, repeatable process for managing and improving their operations in the Cloud. We commonly hear similar questions in the Financial Services Industry such as:
- How do I know my application can achieve my RTO and RPO requirements through high availability / disaster recovery?
- How can I guarantee the proper replication of my data the prevent impact of failure?
- How do I ensure the performance of my application in a cloud-based environment? E.g. Does my application perform at peak loads with a multi-region setup?
- Can my migrated applications handle the volume and latency demand needed for my business requirements?
- What insights/data do I need to record to ensure the continuity of operations for my ecosystem?
- How does my organization respond to failure in the cloud?
- How do I automate my resiliency testing? How can I include resiliency in my CI/CD pipeline?
Observability is the foundation of SRE, and needs to be built in an automated manner that supports complex enterprise environments across all environment tiers – network, infrastructure, data, application, etc. This includes observability across accounts and regions that contain dashboards, alerts, and logs.
Performance and baseline testing is the next step in the Maturity Model, as it is required by the other frameworks. Performance covers the generation of transactional data for the system, identifying the necessary load tests, automation of load tests with the use of a load generator, and collaborating with the application and infrastructure teams to ensure the environment meets the latency, volume, and scaling requirements of the business.
Resiliency is a framework developed to minimize the risk and impact of failure that can occur in both infrastructure and applications by testing and exercising the system to discover expected and unexpected workloads’ components behavior. This effort involves architecture reviews, identification of critical Non-Functional Requirements (RTO, RPO, etc.), implementation of the Failure Mode Effect and Analysis (FMEA) testing framework, and automated resiliency testing.
Gameday takes the experience farther than performance and resiliency. While performance and resiliency test the infrastructure and application, Gameday tests the supporting people, processes, tools, and documentation surrounding performance and resiliency events. Gameday, when executed correctly ensures the appropriate target group 1) gets notified, 2) has the right access, 3) can find the right documentation and solution, and 4) knows when to appropriately escalate to ensure that any events that require manual intervention still meet the business requirements.
Disaster Recovery (DR) is a crucial aspect of ensuring business continuity in the face of unforeseen disruptions. Once an application and its supporting teams and tools have been made resilient, disaster recovery measures can be confidently put in place to meet the business’s requirements. This effort encompasses ensuring that the architecture, runbooks, and operational capabilities are all adequately prepared and as automatable as possible
Chaos is the last step in the Maturity Model. Once the previous pieces are implemented, the enterprise will have enough confidence in their system to enable chaos testing – unplanned events – to ensure that the system can handle actual unplanned events. These events are random in type, severity, and timing.
