How Autonomous Cloud Management and Proactive Actions Can Help SREs

This is the fourth article in a four-part series about Autonomous Cloud Management.  

• Part One: Managing Microservices? Why You Need Autonomous Cloud Management
• Part Two: Pushing Software Faster & Safer: Autonomous Release Intelligence
• Part Three: How Autonomous SLOs Save Time and Money
• Part Four: How Autonomous Cloud Management and Proactive Actions Can Help SREs

In this post, we’ll take a look at another piece of the microservices puzzle — proactive actions and the role they can and should play in keeping your business operations running smoothly.

The Risks of Manual Remediation

With so many microservices comes an increased level of complexity, making management a challenge for site reliability engineers (SREs). And with thousands (or tens of thousands) of microservices comes all of their interconnections and dependencies, which makes remediations challenging.

For example, suppose an SRE needs to manually remediate one single microservice. In that case, they must look at site traffic, service dependencies, load balancers, the service mesh and other factors to determine if it’s “safe” action — after all, the last thing they want to do is mess something up worse than the current issue! Then, they must ensure they follows the exact right steps in the exact right sequence to remediate the problem, well aware that any misstep could be devastating. And sometimes, the action is so critical that the SRE must perform it in less-than-ideal conditions, increasing risk to the system, the business, and your bottom line.

An Alternative, Future-Friendly Solution

If you read the above scenario and think, “There’s got to be a better way,” you’re absolutely right; given how microservices are proliferating and the way the industry is moving, it’s virtually impossible that companies will be able to continue manual remediation. It simply isn’t a logical, sustainable way to operate your company’s infrastructure. But what’s the alternative? Proactive Actions via a continuous autonomous management system.

To remain agile and future-proof your business against competitors and other threats, it’s imperative to support your SREs, providing them the tools to effectively optimize and maintain your vital systems — and to make this happen, you need to invest in autonomous. Autonomous cloud management technology constantly monitors and optimizes, automatically performing real-time actions The intelligent automation system continually learns by monitoring multiple data points across the complex web of microservices and service meshes, then applies that learning into intelligent decisions and corrective actions. And because all of this learning and action is automated in one smart system, your intelligence is always available; you don’t risk losing institutional knowledge should an SRE decide to leave.

An SRE Autopilot, Not Replacement

Is an autonomous platform a replacement for SREs? Not at all — in fact, they should be seen as an SRE autopilot. Because they handle many of the redundant, middle-of-the-night tasks that typically fall on SREs, an autonomous platform empowers SREs to focus on higher-order activities, allowing them to spend time on architectural tasks rather than operational tasks. SREs can be more innovative because they aren’t stuck on the maintenance side of things, and they tend to be happier because the platform is automatically handling critical but low-skill tasks.

An Always-Learning, Self-Healing System

By investing in an autonomous cloud management platform, you’ll be future-proofing your business, moving away from unsustainable manual remediation and toward an always-learning, self-healing system. You’ll also be making the most of your investment in your SREs, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.

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