DevOps 2.0: An Insight To Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Platform Engineering has evolved as an essential discipline in the world of cloud-native systems. But how does it fit into the broader DevOps and SRE conversation? Platform engineering involves the creation and maintenance of platforms that enable developers to efficiently build, deploy, and scale applications. The key difference is that platform engineers create the "platform" or tools that both developers and operations teams use, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks instead of ordinary infrastructure management.

Key Responsibilities of Platform Engineers:

• Build and maintain internal tools and platforms for developers and operations teams.
• Automate system providing and scaling processes.
• Secures seamless integration between development and operations environments.
• Facilitate a collaborative environment across teams for continuous delivery and improvement.

How It Complements or Differs from DevOps and SRE: Platform Engineering shares some common goals with DevOps and SRE, such as automation, collaboration, and system reliability. However, its primary focus is on developing reusable and flexible tools that support both teams. While DevOps focuses on the collaboration between developers and operations, and SRE makes sure of system reliability at scale, Platform Engineering is more about providing the internal architecture and tooling to support both these disciplines.

Site Reliability Engineering is basically creating a bridge between Development and
Operations departments. It is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering
and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create
scalable and highly reliable software systems.

According to Benjamin Treynor , founder of Google's Site Reliability Team, SRE is "what
happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations"
So, from where did the concept of SRE come from? To tell you that, we have to go back to
the year 2003. In that year, Benjamin Treynor was in charge of a production team whose
end goal was to make Google websites more available so that they are always able to
provide service.

Being a software engineer, Benjamin trained the way to work in a way the
way he could have worked if he were a Site Reliability Engineer. He tasked the team to
spend half of their time with the operations team so that they can understand the problem
and contribute to the development in a better way. The team Benjamin Treynor managed, is
Google’s SRE team now.

You might ask now, we already have DevOps dealing with both development and
operations. Why do we need SRE then? Is there any similarity between these two? Let’s
look into the principles and key aspects of both to find out!

From our previous blogs ITIL Vs DevOps , you all know about DevOps already. Right?
DevOps is basically a set of practices to build a culture of collaboration between the
development and operations teams.

DevOps aims to achieve these 5 key points:

1. Reduce organizational silos
2. Accept failure as normal
3. Implement gradual changes
4. Leverage tooling and automation
5. Measure everything

The SRE principles are also aligned in a way so that all the above-mentioned points can be achieved. Let’s see how that can be done!

1. Reduce organizational silos:

• SRE shares ownership with developers to create shared responsibility

• SREs use the same tools that developers use, and vice versa

2. Accept failure as normal:

• SREs embrace risk

• SRE quantifies failure and availability in a prescriptive manner usingService Level Indicators and Service Level Objectives

• SRE mandates blameless post mortems

3. Implement gradual changes:

• SRE allows developers and product owners to function faster by reducing
  the cost of failure

4. Leverage tooling and automation:

• SREs have the charter to automate menial tasks away

5. Measure everything:

• SRE defines prescriptive ways to measure values
• SRE fundamentally believes that systems operation is a software problem

Hope we cleared the air of confusion here? Now, let’s see what a Site Reliability Engineer
has to be taken care of.

What is the role of an SRE?

We gave you a brief idea about the job role of Site Reliability Engineer.
Take a look at the following points, and you will find out the details:

• Site reliability engineers communicate with other engineers, product owners, and
  customers and come up with targets and measures. This helps them to ensure
  system availability. One can easily understand the perfect time to take action once all
  have agreed upon a system’s uptime and availability.
• They introduce error budgets in order to measure risk, balance availability, and
  feature development. When there are no unrealistic reliability targets, a team has the
  flexibility to deliver updates and improvements to a system.
• SRE believes in reducing toil. That results in automating tasks that require a human
  operator to work manually.
• A site reliability engineer should have an in-depth understanding of the systems and
  their connectivity.
• Site reliability engineers have the task of discovering the problems early to reduce
  the cost of failure.

Both DevOps and SRE depend on a variety of tools to simplify workflows, improve collaboration, and automate tasks that dull your energy. Below is a detailed comparison of the tools used in these workflows:

Tools for DevOps:

• CI/CD Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI – These tools help automate the continuous integration and continuous deployment processes, reducing manual intervention and speeding up software delivery.
• Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, Chef – These tools enable infrastructure automation, allowing for consistent environments across different platforms.
• Monitoring Tools: Prometheus, Nagios, Grafana – Used for keeping records of the system performance and identifying possible hurdles before they affect production.

Tools for SRE:

• Incident Management: PagerDuty, Opsgenie – These tools help SRE teams manage and respond to incidents quickly, guaranteeing minimal downtime.
• Error Tracking and Logging: Sentry, Logstash, Elasticsearch – These tools help observe and log errors, allowing the SRE team to quickly look into the issues and resolve them.
• Automated Testing: Selenium, TestComplete – These tools lend SREs a hand to maintain high-quality, flexible systems by automating testing of important infrastructure components.

Best Tools for Different Tasks:

• Continuous Integration: Jenkins (DevOps) vs GitLab CI (DevOps) – Both are great choices for CI, but GitLab CI also provides a more combined version control system, making it more compatible for small to medium-sized teams.
• Monitoring: Prometheus (SRE) vs Nagios (DevOps) – While Prometheus provides a more modern, flexible solution for metrics collection, Nagios provides a time-tested solution that can be useful for simpler observing needs.

DevOps is ideal for organizations looking to improve collaboration and speed up software delivery.

By combining development and operations teams, DevOps minimises the outdated team structure that blocks agile development. Here’s why you might choose DevOps:

• Faster Delivery: DevOps shows automation and CI/CD, speeding up the delivery process.
• Improved Collaboration: By fostering communication between development and operations, DevOps reduces friction and improves overall efficiency.
• Scalability: With automation and infrastructure as code, DevOps practices improve more effectively, especially in cloud environments.

Best for: Teams focusing on delivering new features quickly and maintaining high collaboration between development and operations teams.

While DevOps focuses on collaboration, SRE adds another layer of dependability and scalability, making it a great choice for larger, more complex systems that require high uptime. Here’s why you might prefer SRE:

• Focus on Reliability: SRE makes sure that systems are not only delivered quickly but also remain dependable and flexible.
• Error Budgeting: SRE introduces the concept of error budgets, balancing the need for dependability with the flexibility required for innovation.
• Proactive Monitoring and Incident Management: SRE teams use tools like PagerDuty and Prometheus to quickly identify and resolve incidents, guaranteeing minimal downtime.

Best for: Organizations with large-scale, mission-important systems where uptime and reliability are of the highest priority.

If your organization is already using DevOps and looking to shift to SRE, here’s how to make the shift:

• Start with Reliability as a Primary Goal: Unlike DevOps, which focuses more on speed, SRE shows balancing speed with reliability. Start by adopting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error Budgets to track reliability.
• Implement Automation: Like DevOps, SRE requires extensive automation. However, SRE focuses on automating operational tasks and reducing the struggle to increase system reliability.
• Train Your Teams: Make sure that your team knows the differences between DevOps and SRE. Training them on SRE principles and tools is important for a successful transition.

While both DevOps and SRE aim to improve efficiency and system dependability, there are a few common challenges:

• Cultural Resistance: Both methodologies need a change in culture, which can be difficult to apply, especially in larger, more traditional organizations.
• Balancing Speed and Reliability: For DevOps, the challenge is guaranteeing fast delivery without compromising quality. For SRE, it’s about maintaining reliability while also delivering new features quickly.
• Tool Overload: With so many tools available for observing, automation, and testing, it can be difficult to choose the best ones for your organization’s needs.

Whether you’re considering using DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering, it’s important to understand the distinctions and similarities between these methodologies. DevOps is perfect for fostering collaboration and speeding up software delivery, while SRE ensures system reliability and scalability. Platform Engineering, on the other hand, empowers teams by creating reusable platforms that support both DevOps and SRE goals.

If you’re interested in mastering the difference between SRE and DevOps and improving your skills, check out the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation course. Understand the variations of SRE implementation and equip yourself with the tools to elevate your systems and infrastructure.

Ready to dive deeper into SRE and DevOps? Explore the Future of SRE and learn how SRE Teams Are Using AIOps to take their workflows to the next level. Start learning today with NovelVista!