Why you need both SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and DevOps

Different methodologies are used in application development. By adopting good methodologies, you are assured of reliable and scalable software. The main approaches used are DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Using these approaches, one is assured of an enhanced product release cycle through monitoring, automation, and collaboration. 

What Is SRE (site reliability engineering)?

SRE was developed to create software infrastructure that ensures system needs are met. It uses software development best practices to break down the infrastructure into essential and abstract components. SRE uses three service level commitments to ensure how a system works. These commitments are:

1.    Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

It helps to define the performance, reliability, and system latency.

2.    Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

Defines the goals and targets that should be met to satisfy SLAs. SRE teams set them.

3.    Service Level Indicators (SLIs)

It helps measure the aspects and specific metrics that show how a system follows the SLOs.

SRE Tools

SRE tools help in the automation of routine processes and techniques. The following tools support it.

• Kubernetes
• Cloud platforms
• Source control
• Containers
• Project planning and management tools

Benefits of SRE?

Some of the critical benefits SREs carry are:

• Automation
• Monitoring distributed systems
• Embracing risks
• Strives for simplicity
• Eliminates toil
• Use service-level objectives

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a concept and culture that ensures the rapid release of secure and stable software. It allows collaboration and communication between cross-functional teams enabling improved customer satisfaction and reliable service delivery.

DevOps methodology focuses on some elements, which are:

• Continuous delivery and integration (CI/CD)
• Infrastructure as code
• Automated Testing

Besides the elements, DevOps relies on other methods, which are:

• Scrum
• Agile
• Kanban

Benefits of DevOps?

Some of the critical benefits DevOps carries are:

• It makes Innovation faster by automating repetitive tasks
• Solves problems efficiently
• It cuts down errors in maintenance and infrastructure management, minimising production costs
• Creates a balanced approach to managing software development life cycle, enabling the software teams to be more productive
• Improves customer satisfaction by ensuring quicker delivery of application features

Differences between SRE and DevOps.

1. SREs focuses on enhancing reliability and system availability, while DevOps focuses on development and delivery speed.
2. SRE has a team of Site Reliability Engineers whose background is both in development and operations, while DevOps teams have a variety of roles such SREs, developers, engineers, et.al.
3. DevOps enables collaboration between teams while SRE creates a set of metrics and practices that improve service and collaboration.
4. SRE involves achieving reliability, while DevOps is a template-like guide for collaboration.

Why both SREs and DevOps are needed.

SRE and DevOps are both needed as they complement each other. SRE tooling and techniques compliment DevOps practices and philosophies.

SRE applies principles of software engineering to automate and enhance different functions of IT operations such as:

• Monitoring
• Disaster response
• Capacity Planning

Through collaboration between operations and development teams, the DevOps models help enable the rapid delivery of software products.