Evolving Blameless' SRE Practices

At Blameless, we drink our own champagne, and aim to adopt a mindset of continuous learning to foster resilience. We believe that the adoption of SRE practices is one of the best ways to get there. Like most organizations, our early efforts to implement SRE were imperfect. However, through hard work, teamwork, and investing in what we believe is the most important feature (reliability), we have made significant changes to how we do SRE. And we’re getting better at it every day.

We’re evolving the SRE practice at Blameless so that we can truly practice what we preach with modern practices such as observability, on-call, incident management, SLOs, release engineering, operational readiness, infrastructure engineering, and more. This has led to huge benefits for our organization already. We’ve seen happier customers (see Under Armour’s case study here) who can take advantage of SRE best practices within their organization. We’ve also been able to deliver features that are useful, perform well, and scale, faster than ever. Additionally, SRE helped our developers become accountable and gain visibility into their code in production. But we didn’t stop at just best practices; we also knew we needed the best people.

As part of our SRE evolution, the team is incredibly privileged to announce that Amy Tobey is joining as Staff SRE to help us take our availability and SRE practice to the next level. Amy is a veteran in the industry with over 20 years of experience. Her journey has taken her through some of the most highly sought-after companies in tech such as Netflix, Apple, Github, and more. Her experience ranges from systems administration, to architect, and board member. However, what she’s best at is making distributed systems more reliable. She has a unique ability to apply systems thinking that ties together human, process, and infrastructure factors into holistic narratives that improve empathy and understanding. These are just a few of the many reasons why we are so excited to have her as a team member at Blameless.

Amy’s priorities will focus on helping Blameless further build out its SRE practice, as well as building relationships with engineers and engaging with the community. Ultimately, she will be the voice of SRE and champion for best practices, both within Blameless as well as to the broader community. We are so honored that she’s chosen to join us, and excited for what the future will bring.