DevOps Institute Releases First Ever ‘Global SRE Pulse 2022’ Report

August 9, 2022

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Report finds SRE adoption is well-established, increases IT value from the business perspective and is an essential engineering function for digital transformation

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla., Aug. 9, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — DevOps Institute, a global learning community that empowers the people who power IT, today announced the release of the inaugural “Global SRE Pulse 2022” report. SRE Pulse offers thorough insights into the state, practices, health activities, automation and adoption of SRE across the globe. The report includes input from more than 460 SRE leaders and practitioners from companies of all sizes to provide a detailed and accurate snapshot of the current state of SRE.

The report is available for download at devopsinstitute.com/global-sre-pulse

“The need for Site Reliability Engineers opens new opportunities for DevOps humans to advance their careers and take on an engineering role that provides immense value to organizations around the globe,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “The Global SRE Pulse examines the human and automation aspects of SRE and offers deep insights into SRE adoption, best practices, challenges and outcomes. With adequate development to address the skills gaps, opportunities for SRE are vast for IT professionals – and in high demand at companies of all sizes.”

Research and data analysis for Global SRE Pulse was led by DevOps Institute’s chief research officer, Eveline Oehrlich, with support from sponsors Sumo Logic, AWS, StackState and Sedai.

“The Global SRE Pulse shares promising findings around SRE adoption and the benefits of improving system reliability,” said Oehrlich. “It is encouraging to see that overall adoption is solid. However, companies are at a variety of states of SRE – from the entire organization leveraging SRE (19%) to specific teams, products and services (55%), to piloting SRE (23%). The results demonstrate that SRE enhances development and operations collaboration, increases IT value from the business perspective and is an essential engineering function for digital transformation. As we look ahead, SRE will continue to play an important role in driving value for modern and complex software environments – especially in teams’ efforts for continuous improvement.”

“The need for SREs is not a hype cycle or a fad, it is here to stay. The SRE function is critical to ensure application reliability for digital business. DevOps Institute has its finger on the pulse of this important field. This research further proves the growing prominence of SRE to thwart competition and drive business innovation,” said Bruno Kurtic, Founding VP of Product and Strategy, Sumo Logic.

Key findings from the 2022 ‘Global SRE Pulse’ report include:

More than half of survey respondents who have adopted SRE perceived their company as leaders across customer experience and the quality and speed of innovation. Continuously improving customer experience and the speed of innovation requires attention for digital transformations or ‘digital-first’ to succeed. The adoption of SRE played a big part in their success. SRE is critical for digital transformation and is leveraged in both running the business and serving customers. When asked where SRE is leveraged today (the software your company builds or the set of services SRE teams interact with), 56% of survey respondents said they leverage SRE for operating their Systems of Engagement (SOE) and 42% for their Systems of Record (SOR). The biggest challenge is finding the right skills for SRE to work. Eighty-five percent (85%) of survey respondents cite the lack of staff with the necessary skills as their biggest challenge when implementing SRE. Additional challenges cited in the report include “value of SRE is not understood” (71%), “lack of tools in place” (55%), “don’t have time to implement SRE” (53%), and “lack of management support” (44%). When analyzing the challenges across the different company sizes, there were no significant differences. The biggest source of toil is process issues and new releases. Metrics such as SLAs, SLOs and SLIs are somewhat of a mixed landscape and still cause challenges for implementing and managing them. The most adopted automation tools are observability and monitoring platforms. SRE teams are leveraging automation to increase the rate at which changes are absorbed. For multiple teams with varying topologies all implementing SRE across different ecosystems, intelligent automation ensures reliability, health and continuous operation of systems, applications and services.

“Customers today, whether internal or external, expect 100% availability for the systems they use. The role of Site Reliability Engineering, coupled with effective observability solutions, are two foundational aspects in ensuring reliability. We are pleased to support this important research from DevOps Institute. It will help us all understand where the industry is at, the challenges organizations are facing and the goals they have set for forming SRE teams and implementing observability practices,” said Andreas Prins, VP of product, StackState.

About DevOps Institute
DevOps Institute is a global learning community that empowers the people who power IT – helping you develop both the professional and personal expertise to make the most of DevOps in both your business and your career.

Focused exclusively on all things DevOps, we offer IT professionals – at all levels – deep practical knowledge, a welcoming network of industry leaders, respected certification programs, and insider events.

Media Contact:
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