As the world is becoming more dependent on technology, IT organizations have a big responsibility to ensure that their digital services are always available, reliable, and scalable. This has led to the emergence of several methodologies to manage and optimize software delivery and operations.
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One Such Popular Methodology Is Devops.
DevOps emphasizes collaboration and automation between development and operation teams. And this methodology has been the go-to for many organizations for the past decade.
However, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a more recent approach, is rapidly gaining acceptance due to its unique approach that complements DevOps to ensure reliability and scalability.
With the help of this article, let’s understand — What SRE is and how it’s changing the world of IT.
Why Are Some Companies Switching From Devops To Sre?
Before diving into SRE, let’s get a quick overview of DevOps and why companies have been using it for years.
DevOps is an umbrella term for practices integrating software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It involves automating the software development lifecycle, encouraging team collaboration, and continuous monitoring and feedback to guarantee high-quality software is delivered quickly.
DevOps has been a success in many organizations, but it has certain limitations. For example, DevOps often prioritize rapid software delivery, which may compromise reliability and scalability.
Furthermore, lacking a dedicated reliability engineering function means teams may lack the necessary skills or resources to guarantee their highly reliable services.
Here comes the SRE to fill the void between development and operations by creating an organization’s dedicated reliability engineering function. This team is accountable for ensuring dependable, scalable, and resilient services.
In other words, SRE takes a specialized and focused approach to reliability engineering that goes hand in hand with other team functions.
What is Site Reliability Engineering?
The concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) was first introduced by Google in 2003.
It is an innovative blend of software engineering and operations where site reliability engineers use automation and various software engineering methods to solve operational issues.
With the help of SRE, organizations try to foster a culture of dependability by making their services available and scalable at all times.
Although the DevOps teams care about reliability, it’s not their primary goal.
Benefits of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Improved Reliability: SRE teams strive to guarantee highly reliable services, which helps reduce the risk of service outages or downtime, which could majorly affect an organization’s reputation and profitability.
- Scalability: SRE teams ensure services are highly scalable, meaning they can handle increasing traffic and usage levels. This ensures that the services can continue to meet the organization’s demands as it expands.
- Cultivate a culture of reliability: SRE fosters an atmosphere of reliability within an organization by focusing on reliability and setting SLOs (Service Level Objectives). By doing this, organizations align around one common goal and cultivate an atmosphere that values reliability.
- Faster incident resolution: SRE teams employ a formal incident response process with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, communication plans, and post-incident reviews to guarantee incidents are resolved quickly and that the organization gains insight from them. This helps ensure incidents are resolved efficiently while also providing opportunities for learning from them.
Roles And Responsibilities Of SRE
Are you looking to make a career in SRE? If so, let’s look at SRE roles and responsibilities to better understand what an organization will expect from you as an SRE.
An SRE (or SRE team) has the following primary roles and responsibilities:
- Troubleshooting software/system issues
- Responding quickly to client concerns
- Streamlining IT processes with software
- Responsibilities related to on-call management
- Documenting their understanding of systems and common errors
- Automating system administration
- Preventing future errors by analyzing past problems
SREs always search for new ways to improve systems and reduce common errors and incidents. In the event of a malfunction, an SRE should address it immediately. Then, the SRE should consider how to enhance the reliability of that system to prevent such an error from occurring in the future.
Conclusion
Site Reliability Engineering is a new methodology that is gaining popularity these days. Some people consider it a replacement for DevOps, while others consider it a compliment.
Whatever the case, one can’t deny that SRE strives to guarantee both the reliability and scalability of digital services within organizations.
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