In order to fight segmented workflows, diminished collaboration, and a lack of visibility throughout the software development lifecycle, DevOps has become increasingly popular. While fostering a DevOps culture has improved team communication and speeded up the delivery of dependable software, DevOps teams may not always have a member who is solely focused on creating solutions that improve site performance and stability.
A site reliability engineer (SRE) enters the picture in this situation. Site reliability engineers work at the nexus of software development and conventional IT. Software engineers that create and install software to increase the reliability of their systems make up the majority of SRE teams.
Site Reliability Engineering's History
At Google, site reliability engineering was established in 2003. The tech juggernaut introduced it to improve the effectiveness, scalability, and dependability of its large-scale websites. Several leading technological firms, like Netflix and Amazon, quickly embraced the new procedure with site reliability engineering services due to its tremendous impact.
Site reliability engineering eventually made a full entry into the IT industry by automating processes including capacity and performance planning, risk management, catastrophe response, and on-call monitoring.
Site Reliability Engineering: What Is It?
Sysadmins have been writing code for a long time, but for a large portion of that period, a team of sysadmins manually maintained numerous machines. When scaling to thousands or hundreds of thousands of hosts, "many" may have then meant dozens or even hundreds, but you can't just keep throwing people at the issue. When there are that many machines, it is evident that managing hosts and the software that runs on them should be done through code.
Furthermore, the operations team and the development team were wholly independent until recently. Each job was thought to require entirely different skill sets. Both jobs are attempted to be combined under the SRE role.
Are SRE and DevOps the Same?
DevOps is a cutting-edge approach to delivering higher-quality applications more quickly. It automates the software delivery lifecycle and increases collaboration between the development and operations teams.
Similar to SRE, DevOps increases a company's agility by balancing the requirement to deliver more apps and updates more quickly with the need to keep the production environment from "breaking." By creating an acceptable risk of errors, DevOps, like SRE, seeks to achieve this balance. In fact, SRE and DevOps appear to be the same thing to some experts, but the majority regard SRE methods as effective approaches to deploying DevOps ideas.
What Does an Engineer for Site Reliability Do?
A site reliability engineer is a middleman between operations and development. The SRE is a software developer who has knowledge of and experience with IT operations.
This engineer will be skilled at writing code because a large portion of this work involves writing and developing code to automate tasks like analyzing logs, testing production settings, and responding to any issues.
As a result, developers are able to concentrate only on feature development, enabling them to launch new features as soon as feasible.
For their part, the operations staff will see a reduction in workload as an SRE automates fixes for any persistent issues.
To maintain a balance between the two, he or she will switch between development and operations tasks.
Because automation is an SRE engineer's primary area of interest, this improves software development processes' performance, efficiency, and monitoring.
SRE Responsibilities
- Assemble and analyze an operating system and application metrics to help with performance tuning and issue detection.
- Working along with development teams, implement stringent testing and release processes to enhance services.
- Engage in platform management, capacity planning, and system design consultation.
- By using automation and advancements, create sustainable systems and services.
- With clearly stated service-level objectives, strike a balance between feature development pace and dependability.
Conclusion
SRE and DevOps are two popular disciplines with a lot of overlap; their main objectives are to comprehend how to gauge success or failure and how to achieve continuous reliability across all applications. Every stage of the process, from application quality through performance and all the way up to security, is crucial to reliability; it is not only a concern for the infrastructure.
SREs take an interest in each step of the process, from development to deployment, and this is how they establish themselves as a genuine link between development and operations.
