To help make the season less stressful, here’s a list of what SREs should be thinking about during the holidays, and tips on getting through the season with …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. It’s almost a cliché to say you have a love/hate relationship with the holiday season. But if you’re an SRE, you may have better reasons than the rest of humanity to hate the end-of-year holidays in particular. Indeed, even if you like the holidays themselves, the fact that reliability issues tend to peak during the holiday period is reason enough for SREs to be less than perfectly cheerful at this time of year. To help make the season a bit less stressful for SREs tasked with keeping critical systems running during times of high demand, here’s a list of what SREs should be thinking about during the holidays, and tips on getting through the season with your SLIs intact. Let’s start by discussing the two main reasons why some SREs face particular challenges during the holiday season: Heavier site load, and higher stakes for preventing issues. It’s no secret that demand for the applications and systems that SREs oversee tend to peak around the holidays. And we’re not talking here just about sites or apps related to shopping, although those do see peak activity toward the end of the year. A variety of other systems also tend to come under heavy load around the holidays. Internal LOB apps may see a spike in usage as departments close out their books or prepare end-of-year reports. Sites associated with leisure activity may experience high traffic levels when more people take time off from work. Social media apps need to contend with a surge of users uploading photos of their holiday festivities. And so on. This is a problem for SREs, of course, because with more load comes a higher risk that something will go wrong.
