Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some quick answers to questions we get asked regularly

What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) ?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is at the intersection between software engineering and system operations. Its main goal is to create scalable and high reliable software systems by combining activities for release speed (required by development teams), quality control (required by QA teams) and system stability (required by operations teams). 

Learn more about SRE

What does Effective SRE actually mean ?

Effective SRE is an industrialized approach that enables any organisation (thus democratized approach) to successfully adopt SRE principles. Digital Architects Zurich developed the methodology after seeing how difficult it was for organizations to adapt and implement SRE from the books for their purposes. We use it today at various customers to drive adoption of customized SRE implementations.

What is a Digital Architect ?

With a broad experience in both software engineering and system engineering as well as deep knowledge of cloud/on-premise infrastructure, a Digital Architect collaborates with product owners, engineers, operators and architects to design and build reliable systems and software. His concern is to ensure that tooling and processes for software delivery (e.g. CI/CD toolchain), quality assurance (e.g. automation) and operations are fit for purpose. He leverages knowledge from the areas of cloud technology, machine learning and application architecture.

What is Observability ?

The book definition of Observability is to be a non-functional quality attribute which defines to which extend a system enables the inferring of its internal states from the knowledge of its external outputs. I.e. how well does a system or component expose state and can be monitored without adding external agents to do so. Typical information that is collected/exposed by a system include: metrics, events, locs and traces (MELT).
Additionally, we see Observability as a new collaboration model within monitoring: developers and DevOps teams become owner of monitoring configuration (metrics, alerts and dashboards), thereby decentralising responsibility for application visibility and monitoring away from central monitoring teams and  towards earlier in the application lifecycle.

What's the difference between DevOps and SRE ?

DevOps is a concept, operating and collaboration model on how to create and operate modern software. One role that supports the implementation and scalability of DevOps is the Site Reliability Engineer. SREs are development-focused engineers who solve operational/scale/reliability problems. The relation between SRE and DevOps is often expressed as “class SRE implements DevOps”.

What is the Digital Highway for Continuous Software Delivery ?

The Digital Highway for Continuous Software Delivery is a flexible and high-speed software delivery pipeline that empowers the cross-functional DevOps teams to innovate and reliably deploy new functionalities at high frequency and availability. It combines cloud-native and AI-driven technology and supports an SRE/DevOps operating model.

Learn more about The Digital Highway’s blueprint

What is AIOps ?

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) combines machine learning with the constantly growing amount of data available to IT Operations. Through big data approaches, AIOps is able to deal with the increase in volume and at the same time gain velocity in problem identification and resolution through intelligent analysis and automation. Anomaly detection, event correlation and root cause analysis are leveraged to improve monitoring, ITSM and automated remediation. 

Something else ?

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