If you want your website and applications to operate effectively and reliably; you want to bridge development and IT operations teams for your IT business to grow, or you are thinking of acquiring a new highly in-demand job role, you should learn about site reliability engineering (SRE) approach that is growing in popularity in the recent years.
What is SRE?
In 2003 Google had given a task to their software engineers to make their grand scale site more efficient, reliable and user-friendly. The approach they used to work with the site was so effective that many IT giants decided to adopt it. We talk about site reliability engineering (SRE) practices that are used to implement software development solutions into IT operations processes like performance planning, configuring, monitoring, failure alerting and others. These practices correlate perfectly with DevOps practices such as continuous integration/delivery and infrastructure as a code approach. Due to SRE, tasks traditionally performed by operations, manually, as a rule, are resolved using automation and software. Automation is the most essential component of the SRE model as site reliability engineers are always searching for ideas on how to improve and automate operations tasks. This way, SRE enhances any system’s reliability.
DevOps and SRE. What is the difference?
Similar: Both DevOps and SRE aimed to deliver high-quality and client-oriented software products and features faster. Both DevOps and SRE were designed to break a wall between key software development teams for them to unite their forces in one seamless workflow. Different: SR engineers, who have an IT operations background, operate within the development team to fulfill operations tasks and project work, while DevOps engineers make sure all software development cycles (from planning to product maintenance) is smoothly run. In terms of the main focus: DevOps concentrates on moving through SDLC, while SRE fixates on balancing site reliability with creating new features.
What does a site reliability engineer do?
SRE teams’ responsibilities include:
- Code deployment and configuration;
- Software for efficient IT operations building;
- Performance planning and monitoring;
- Immediate failure alerting;
- Prompt support issues fixing;
- Optimizing on-call processes and documenting;
- Reporting to the teams.
Basically, site reliability engineers spend 50% of their work on operations tasks and project work and the rest 50% on development such as building codes for new features that can help automate operations processes, monitoring and others.
Bottom line
Once again, SRE is an approach to software development that automates environment management following the principles the developers use when building the code. Site reliability engineering is crucial if you want your websites and applications to work effectively and reliably. With this aim in view, a great idea would be to turn to companies that provide site reliability engineering services for their dedicated teams to ensure the high availability of your products and services and improve the end-user experience of your customers. Moreover, you might have certain operational or structural bottlenecks, the existence of which can be discovered through costly error correction only. With that in mind, hiring an expert in SRE helps identify these bottlenecks and remove them at once.