No matter how you define it, the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role is clearly expanding into more and more companies. To be effective in this new role, SREs must possess a depth of understanding of how different systems work together, how they fail, how they can be improved, and how they can best be designed and monitored.

Here are the steps you’ll need to gain acceptance and maximize your effectiveness, whether you’re still figuring out how to create a site reliability practice at your company or you’re trying to improve the processes and habits of an existing SRE team.

Tori Wieldt has over 15 years of experience in technology and SaaS, as a product marketing and community management executive at the leading cloud computing and technology companies New Relic, Oracle