In today’s fast-paced and increasingly cloud-native development and operations environment, site reliability engineers (SREs) – the hybrid brainchildren of early experiments at Google – must wield an array of seemingly superpowered abilities through which they maintain order and vanquish foes. SREs straddle diverse areas of responsibility and expertise to resolve the tension between developers’ need for speed and security and operations’ obligation to ensure secure and uninterrupted uptime. To an outside observer, holding it all together may appear to be a superhuman feat reminiscent of the powers of comic book lore.
The Telekinesis of Coding Automation
The scalability of cloud-native environments renders systems management through traditional manual intervention impossible. Like the telekinetics of Jean Grey commanding atoms at distance, SREs leverage automation to set infrastructure and security policy in motion wherever and whenever new applications and instances are spun.
Clairvoyance Across Time, Space, and Logs
When the unexpected occurs, SREs are on hand to drive incident response by interpreting logs and reconstructing event narratives across clouds, containers, microservices, and disjointed timelines. As no single logging tool contains the whole picture, SREs must make inferences against the possible pathways an event sequence may have taken to cause the observed incident. When SREs succeed at extracting this kind of insight from disparate and incomplete logs, they bring a clairvoyance à la Dr. Strange’s scrying orb, Eye of Agamotto to incident response teams.
This Looks Like a Job for an SRE
The IT world often describes SREs as developers who can “keep the lights on” in complex, large-scale environments. Between getting to the root causes of security and operations mysteries to automating the manual systems management tasks of multiple operations personnel, SREs fill a Superman-like role in modern IT, bringing the day-to-day diligence of Clark Kent but keeping in reserve powers to resolve crises and restore order.
Enhancing SRE Powers with Spyderbat
SREs apply a powerful skillset to meet the challenges of upholding service-level objectives while keeping environments secure from internal and external threats. With Spyderbat’s cloud-native runtime security platform, SREs can extend their capabilities even further.
Flashback
Capturing and persisting runtime behavior throughout distributed environments and containers, Spyderbat allows SREs to flashback through past events to trace causal sequences to their roots in a matter of moments. And even before serious incidents arise, Spyderbat monitors runtime behaviors for deviations and early warning signs.
Guardian
When SREs leverage Spyderbat’s Guardian, application drift meets its match. Guardian continuously compares live application instances against previous versions to identify application drift at the earliest possible moment. Equipped with this insight and protection, SREs and DevOps teams can intervene before the damage is done and get applications back on track.
Scout
Spyderbat’s Scout uses kernel-level eBPF data to illuminate activities throughout the entirety of your environment enabling real-time attack interception and automated blocking for high-threat traces. After successfully preventing live attacks, Interceptor dissects the specific pathways exploited by attackers to prevent similar intrusions in the future.
To learn more about what Spyderbat can do to enhance your teams’ superpowers, get a quick demo here!
