Site Reliability Engineering – Roles & Responsibilities

The concept of SRE originated at Google in 2003, and its credit goes to Ben Treynor Sloss. He was the originator of the term SRE, who handled a production team of seven engineers. Ben Treynor asked his team members to spend half of their time on operations tasks. It helps the team to get a better understanding of how to develop software. Besides, it helped him to complete tasks successfully.

A site reliability engineer (SRE) acts as a link between development and IT operations and performs the duties normally done by the operations. Usually, these engineers use automation technologies to solve problems by developing scalable and trustworthy software systems. The primary goal of SRE is to create software systems and automated solutions for operational issues. As a result, SRE performs the work traditionally performed by operations. They utilize engineers with software expertise to solve complex problems.

The main role of SRE teams is writing and developing code to automate processes like analyzing logs, testing production environments, and responding to issues. The engineer who uses this approach will become an expert in writing code. It also allows developers to focus solely on feature development and bring new features to production. An SRE can automate solutions to any recurring problem and reduce the workload of the operations team.

Roles and Responsibilities of an SRE

Your business can improve by using the concept of SRE. An organization can improve its people, processes, and technology with the service of site reliability engineers. They work based on the SRE principle in order to develop highly reliable software systems and solve operation and IT issues. SRE teams also provide numerous benefits in terms of speed and reliability, whether they adopted a full-fledged DevOps culture or tried to do so.

Your business can improve by using the concept of SRE. An organization can improve its people, processes, and technology with the service of site reliability engineers. They work as per the SRE principle to develop highly reliable software systems and solve operation, and IT issues. SRE teams also provide numerous benefits in terms of speed and reliability, whether they adopted a full-fledged DevOps culture or tried to do so.

What is the importance of site reliability engineering in a project?

With the growing dependencies on DevOps principles, many projects have implemented site reliability engineering. It illustrates the extent of functional and non-functional stability, flexibility, scalability, and deliverability in software already deployed to the production environment. So, understanding its primary benefits in a project is crucial.

Facilitates collaboration

Site reliability engineering principles improve collaboration between the operational and development teams. When developers make hardcode changes in the existing code base or develop new functionality, it is the responsibility of the operations team to ensure seamless integration, deployment, and deliverability. Unless and until both teams are on the same ground, providing the final software released to the live environment meets most of the business requirements is challenging.

Enhances user experience and satisfaction

While multiple testing approaches are conducted before final sprint delivery to the production environment, it is not easy to determine a zero-error working condition of the software. Instead, errors will occur when the codebases are executed with real-time scenarios. Apart from this, there can be issues with server uptime, file deployment, load balancing, overall performance, and many more.

So, delivering software with minimal bugs and impact on customer satisfaction is crucial. SRE enables the team to automate various phases of the SDLC, including code build, testing, and deployment, to ensure the time consumed can be reduced significantly and bugs are fixed at the earliest with minimum impact on UX.

Better planning from the operations team

With the help of an SRE model, the operations team can always stay prepared for a failover scenario where the software delivered fails to perform expectedly. It can be due to a code error, server issue, deployment problem, or anything else. So, the operations team creates an incident response to handle such problems and delivers a workaround at the earliest so that the software downtime can be tolerated easily.

Principles Site Reliability Engineers follow

• Monitoring:

From SLAs to SLOs, there are numerous ways through which site reliability engineers monitor the software’s performance metrics, uptime and downtime, functionalities, and many more. This further reduces the chances of missing any blocker issue, failure condition, etc.

• Gradual implementation of changes:

Most often, SRE professionals plan for sprint deliveries where small changes are deployed to the production environment in a small periodical manner. This enhances system reliability, software stability, and prevention of blocker failure.

• Automation:

Also, it is the responsibility of a site reliability engineer to automate manual processes, like code builds, testing, and many more. Automated processes are easier to execute and don’t need any external interference.

DevOps – A set of software development practices

DevOps is a combination of two words, development and operations. It is a set of software development practices that focus on collaboration between the Development and Operations Team. A DevOps engineer can develop and deliver software faster with a low failure rate.

DevOps Engineer v/s Site Reliability Engineer

SRE and DevOps seem to be two sides of the same coin. Both activities are aimed at bridging the gap between development and operations teams. They have the common goal of improving the release cycle without compromising quality. A site reliability engineer and a DevOps engineer have similar tasks and responsibilities. However, there is a critical and nuanced distinction between the roles of DevOps and site reliability engineers.