Do you think IIT Guwahati certified course can help you in your career?
Introduction
With the increasing complexity of applications, organizations are adopting scalable, reliable, and error-free technologies. SRE(Site Reliability Engineering) and DevOps(Development-Operations) are two methodologies that enhance the application through collaboration, monitoring, and automation.
In this article, we will learn about SRE and DevOps goals, work, and benefits. We will also see the key differences between SRE and DevOps.
What is SRE?
SRE refers to Site Reliability Engineering. It is a methodology that improves the reliability of software systems. Its underlying idea is to automate IT management operations like project management, operating system administration, incident handling, and emergency management, traditionally done by system admins. The main goal of SRE is identifying and fixing the problems at early stages in the development process, thereby reducing the probability of system failures. SRE is a major component of agile development, encouraging developers to iterate and constantly test their software.
What does SRE do?
Site Reliability Engineers majorly focus on the systems' performance, availability, and reliability. They are also responsible for developing procedures and implementing policies that would help the site's overall development. Some key responsibilities of SREs include the following:
Service Reliability and Automation
SREs ensure the services meet the required SLOs (Server Level Objectives). It also develops, maintains, and automates the systems to streamline the operations. Repetitive tasks are automated, which helps in reducing manual tools.
Regular Feedbacks
The team regularly conducts feedback surveys, which help understand, identify, and fix problems. This process allows the executives to track how well the team is performing by noting the number of issues the team has resolved.
System Changes
SREs help in establishing a robust change management process. It conducts risk assessments and ensures the changes are implemented, monitored, and tested. This helps in reducing the risk while the system changes are done.
MTTR
MTTR refers to Mean Time To Recover. In simple words, it is the average time taken to recover from an incident. A lower MTTR indicates faster response and efficient resolution. SRE teams have the ability to roll back to the previous stable version of the application so that MTTR is reduced.
MTTD
MTTD refers to Mean Time to Detect. As the name suggests, it is the average time taken to detect an incident or service disruption. A low MTTD value indicates faster response thereby reducing the impact of incidents. MTTD is reduced with the help of Canary Rollouts. Canary Rollouts helps SRE team to find bugs and issues at early stages of development.
Benefits of SRE
Some of the benefits of SRE include:
Reduced Downtime
The issues/problems are detected and fixed early in the development process, thus reducing the application's downtime. It also helps minimize system disruptions and enhance the system's overall reliability.
Collaboration between development and operations
SRE facilitates and enhances the collaboration between the development and operations teams. SRE helps in the development of context for operations which supports systems in production. The main focus of SRE is to develop a services-first architecture that leverages the benefits of both operations and development.
Improved Security
SRE helps enhance security as the issues are identified and fixed before a problem occurs. It also helps reduce manual errors by automating the testing, deployment, and testing response.
What is DevOps?
DevOps combines two words, ‘Dev’ and ‘Ops.’ ‘Dev’ refers to developers, while ‘Ops’ means operations. DevOps combines development and operations teams working to develop a robust and innovative product with enhanced features. DevOps is about giving the operations teams a clear vision of how the systems are used so they can react more efficiently and quickly whenever anything goes wrong. Safety is the top-notch priority in DevSecOps, a term that describes the DevOps team. It automates slow and tedious tasks which in the past required the assistance of other developers/groups, thereby boosting the development process.
What does DevOps do?
The role of a DevOps engineer is to make an existing software infrastructure more efficient, reliable, and scalable. This can be done by improving the existing technologies and methodologies used in the previous development of the software application. Some key features of DevOps include:
Communication and Collaboration
DevOps encourages collaboration and communication between the development and operations teams. It promotes cross-functional teams, emphasizing the need for communication to improve efficiency and reduce errors.
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)
DevOps uses CI/CD, which helps in frequent and automated software updates. CI refers to Continuous Integration, which refers to the regular merging of code in a shared repository and testing the code, which helps catch the integration issues. CD refers to Continuous Development automating the software's deployment process, which ensures that the software is always in a releasable state.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
DevOps promotes IaC, where deployments and infrastructure configurations are managed through code and version control.
Shorter Release Cycle
DevOps develops and delivers the applications faster with a shorter release cycle. A shorter release cycle is possible as it is easy to manage and roll back the changes i.e. the stable/previous version of the application can be rolled back in case there are any issues.
Benefits of DevOps
Some of the benefits of DevOps are:
Reduced Time
By automating the tasks, DevOps reduces the time spent on tasks that are not necessary. This helps in faster development, reduced costs, and increased quality of the application.
Continuous Improvement
DevOps continuously monitors the application and also conducts regular feedback surveys. It also provides a culture of continuous improvement by learning from failures and seeking opportunities to enhance infrastructure and processes.
Reduced Human Error
DevOps automates repetitive tasks such as building, testing, and deploying software. Automation helps in reducing human errors and thereby accelerating the process of development of software.
Some of the key differences between SRE and DevOps are
Basis
SRE
DevOps
Definition
It focuses on implementing and designing dependable and scalable systems.
It manages software development processes by collaborating with the development and operations team.
Automation
Smaller versions are tested before releasing a major version.
It automates repetitive tasks such as building, testing, and deploying software. It gradually introduces new ideas.
Approach
SRE is an approach for IT operations that considers the production environment as a highly available service.
It promotes a cross-functional approach that emphasizes the need of communication to improve efficiency and thereby reduce errors.
Goal
SRE aims at making the site/application more reliable.
DevOps aims at collaborating and improving the communication between groups to work more efficiently and effectively.
Associated Teams
Works closely with the operations teams.
Works closely with product development teams.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SRE?
SRE refers to Site Reliability Engineering. It is a methodology that improves the reliability of software systems. Its underlying idea is to automate IT management operations like project management, operating system administration, incident handling, and emergency management, which is traditionally done by system admins.
Does SRE involve coding?
The main purpose of SRE is to make the site reliable by testing the code. It does not require coding. However, SRE’s create tickets and documentation reported by different teams, thereby making the site more robust and reliable.
How are DevOps and SRE related?
DevOps and SRE are closely related and are complementary to each other. DevOps emphasizes automation and focuses on collaboration between development and operations teams, while SRE is a specific implementation of DevOps which focuses on the reliability of the system.
Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed SRE vs DevOps. To learn more about SRE’s and DevOps, you can refer to the below-mentioned articles:
We hope this article has helped you understand the key differences between SRE and DevOps. If this article helped you in any way, then you can read more such articles on our platform, Coding Ninjas Studio. You will find articles on almost every topic on our platform. Also, for cracking good product-based companies, you can practice coding questions at Coding Ninjas. For interview preparations, you can read the Interview Experiences of popular companies.
19+ registered 
