The integration of AI and ML systems into businesses marks a pivotal moment for SRE, expanding into AI Reliability Engineering (AIRe).
AIRe addresses the unique demands of AI/ML workloads, requiring a shift in operational approaches.
Silent model degradation in AI systems, where outputs degrade over time without traditional errors, poses significant challenges.
AI-specific observability is crucial to combat degradation, focusing on data drift, model drift, accuracy, latency, bias detection, and feature importance.
Tools like AI Gateways are emerging as indispensable for managing AI inference workloads.
Adapting SRE practices for AI involves defining AI-centric SLOs/SLIs, error budgets accounting for model degradation, incident response plans, and continuous model evaluation.
The 'Third Age of SRE' emphasizes the importance of AI Reliability Engineering in ensuring the accuracy and performance of AI systems.
Ensuring reliable AI systems goes beyond infrastructure to encompass the intelligence driving the systems.
New observability practices, tools like AI Gateways, and adapted SRE principles are essential in the Third Age of SRE.
The responsibility of SREs now extends to ensuring AI systems are accurate, fair, and performant to maintain trust and reliability.