What is an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer)?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) may sound like a fancy job title, but it’s actually one of the most practical and important roles in modern infrastructure and software teams. What is an SRE? SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineer. In simple terms, an SRE ensures that systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. The concept was born at Google, where software engineers were tasked with running production systems using software engineering principles. ...

July 25, 2025 · 2 min · 221 words · John Cena

SRE Golden Signals: simple and practical

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is not just about “keeping things up” — it’s about building systems that are reliable and understandable. At the heart of this idea lies a simple but powerful toolset: the four golden signals. Let’s break them down in human terms — no jargon, just practical insights. 🚨 What Are the Golden Signals? Golden signals are the four key metrics that Google’s SRE team recommends tracking for any user-facing service: ...

July 24, 2025 · 2 min · 338 words · DevOps Insights

What is Observability? Explained Simply

What is Observability? Have you ever deployed an app to production and something just felt… off? Maybe it’s slower than usual. Maybe users are seeing errors, but you’re not sure why. This is where observability comes in. Observability is about answering the question: “What’s going on inside my system?” 🧠 The Core Idea Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces: logs, metrics, and traces. ...

July 18, 2025 · 2 min · 297 words · John Cena

What is Prometheus? Explained Simply

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that was originally built at SoundCloud. Think of it as your application’s heartbeat monitor — constantly watching, collecting, and helping you understand what’s going on. 🧠 Why Prometheus? Imagine you’re running an application with hundreds of containers across multiple environments. How do you know if something’s slow or broken? Prometheus answers that by: Scraping metrics from your apps and infrastructure Storing data efficiently using a time-series database Letting you query metrics with a powerful language (PromQL) Alerting you when things go wrong 🔧 How It Works Prometheus works by pulling metrics from exporters (tiny HTTP servers that expose /metrics). For example: ...

July 18, 2025 · 2 min · 241 words · John Cena