Author
Mercedes Acevedo
Some time ago we started to identify differences regarding the implementation of processes in projects among the internal teams. With this in mind, we assembled a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team with the aim to standardize the way we run our production systems, and to provide DevOps, SRE and Cloud Consulting Services to our clients.
What is SRE?
SRE has the mission to protect, provide for, and progress the software and systems behind all development projects with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance, and capacity.
This team tries to tackle two main problems: the functionality and stability of the projects over time, providing tools to work on its productions while avoiding technical debt. Our SRE specialists are responsible for the implementation of cloud migration, log and secret management, the dockerizing of a project, and for the continuous integration and delivery of tools to catapult productivity and efficiency into our clients’ products. Moreover, relying on such a group offers benefits, not only for the company but also for the clients:
Benefits for the company:
- Infrastructure and documentation organization.
- Standardized containers.
- Flexibility between projects.
- Guidelines and recommendations through an SRE.
- Compliance Framework.
- Improve the speed in setup and deployment processes. A suite of recommendation tools, like for instance, error tracking.
This implies that the arrival of a new developer to a project that is already running may be as smooth as possible while working faster in a more productive and efficient way.
Benefits for the clients:
- We can build more quality products.
- Create environments with high availability and scalability capabilities.
- Help them save time (and money!) due to fewer iterations.
- Economize budgets allocated for cloud services.
Our team works as a plugin to organizations, bringing talented professionals, tools, and processes that are integrated smoothly into the company’s operations.
Our clients’ success stories working with SRE
Our SRE team has been working with several of our clients and projects such as Bucksapp, MapRight, Tabula Rasa, Finepanel, StarterHome, DriverFinder, Bancard, and Inari, among others.
Bucksapp case study: SRE as a part of your team
Bucksapp is an app that tackles a very relevant and urgent issue for college students: it advances cash in a fast and reliable way. We have been working with them since August 2019, and from that moment on the SRE team became part of the project. The integration between the Bucksapp and the SRE team was totally natural.
Fabio Lima, Developer at Moove It, has been working with Bucksapp since the client started operating with us. “Counting on the SRE team is very helpful, especially when new people are added to the project. Using SRE techniques, especially the use of Docker, that problem isn’t an issue anymore, and as it works on any machine, regardless of its geographic location, it’s also very useful in deploys and for putting projects into production”, he adds.
One of the tasks where SRE directly worked on was the secret management. Guillermo Chao, developer and member of the SRE team here at Moove It explained that the SRE team, together with the client’s team, started to handle the application’s secrets by using Vault. “SRE set up the Vault server in the client’s Google Cloud structure and accomplished to connect the application to that new server. By doing so we were able to negotiate the secrets and therefore, use them”.
Do you want to read more about how our SRE team can help with your project? Check out our website.
MapRight case study: SRE assessment
MapRight is an application that helps users to explore large stretches of land without having to move from their homes. It creates impressive maps and templates in a fast and accessible way. MapRight’s tools and layers are designed to create maps that are beautiful, easy to read, and ready to be shared with anybody. This client has been working with us since June 2014. But it was not until last year that the SRE team has become a significant part of the improvement of the project.
German Barrios, Principal at Moove It, works with MapRight directly, and explained what was the problem that led us to work with the SRE team: “As a result of a database failure, the client’s team asked SRE to make a situation analysis of the project in order to detect possible points of failure”. Finally, both teams jointly with the client came to terms that the best solution would be to migrate to AWS, for three main reasons:
- Greater confidence in this service.
- Long term, it would be financially advantageous for the client.
- AWS represented more and better features that the teams could take advantage of.
Accordingly, SRE executed a cost plan to validate it with the client first, who was on board from the very beginning, and an action plan on how the migration would go.
We started up an implementation roadmap to align expectations with our clients:
So, along with our clients’ teams, we analyze their projects in terms of performance, good practices, and security standards, and accordingly provide the action plan that fits best to their needs.
More benefits
SRE is also beneficial when it comes to reducing conflicts between versions of the same application. For instance, when a developer is working on more than one project, and it has more than one environment installed on their computer, SRE allows us to separate it in a very efficient way, avoiding version conflicts. What is more, this is as well useful for several projects within the same client, or when working for more than one client at the same time.
To conclude, thanks to SRE we now can accelerate the product development cycle, minimize costs, drive efficiency, and increase security.
Do you have any questions for us? Get in touch!
