DevOps and SRE (site reliability engineering ) are approaches that help organizations to enhance the product release cycle by working together to automate processes, provide better monitoring, and increase collaboration.
Site Reliability Engineering was first created in 2003 as a framework to support developers building large-scale applications. SRE combines system operations responsibilities with software development and software engineering. The main objective of Site Reliability Engineering is to develop a highly reliable and ultra-scalable system or software application.
As systems become more distributed, ensuring reliability across the distributed environment is challenging. Customers expect methods to be constantly available, and even a brief outage (downtime) can be detrimental to an organization’s reputation. DevOps Engineers bridge the gap between operations and development by solving problems developers need more time to address. Site Reliability Engineers bridge the gap between development and operations by addressing issues related to scalability, reliability, and uptime of applications.
Over the past few years, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering cultures and practices have gained popularity. Both solve distinct challenges with innovative approaches that usher in new technological paradigms. The goal of more efficient and reliable systems has been at the forefront of technological advances for many years. Many other facets of technology have benefited from recent advancements, so it is not surprising to find specialized organizations and engineers working on these goals.
Although SRE didn’t emerge from DevOps, it is aligned with DevOps. SRE and DevOps have many things in common as they both are methodologies put in place to monitor production and ensure that operation management works as expected. Both aim at improving the release cycle and achieving better product reliability. Both approaches focus on people working together as a team with shared responsibilities. There are some differences between DevOps and SRE.
DevOps is about developing core features. SRE is about taking those features and making them work.
DevOps teams focus on core development; they create products or applications that solve someone’s problem. They take an agile approach to software development that helps them build, test, deploy and monitor their applications quickly with quality results.
SREs are working on the implementation of the core. They’re constantly giving feedback to that core development group, helping them know how their software is being used. They also use operations data and software engineering to automate IT operations tasks, speeding up software delivery while minimizing IT risk.
DevOps and SREs have different skill sets. Core development DevOps team loves writing software; they write code and test it, then push it into production to get an application line to solve a problem. SREs are more investigative: they ensure that the same problems don’t keep happening; they follow proactive strategies rather than reactive ones.; SREs automate repetitive tasks to ensure innovation.
Automation is the key to productivity and innovation. DevOps automate deployments, and SREs automate redundancy, which allows them to focus on building excellent services that keep the stack up and running.
Figure 1 SRE vs. DevOps
DevOps leads organizations to agility by balancing the need to deliver more products and changes faster by accepting error risk while following SRE practices.SRE and DevOps seem so similar that experts say they’re the same thing—but most see SRE practices as excellent ways to implement DevOps principles. For example:
DevOps principles: Reduce organizational silos.
DevOps works to ensure that different departments/software teams are not isolated from each other.
SRE practice
SRE enables this by enforcing the ownership of projects between teams. Everyone uses the same tools, techniques, and codebase to support team workflow uniformity.
DevOps principles: Implement gradual changes.
DevOps embraces slow, gradual change to allow teams to improve their applications continuously.
SRE practice
SRE supports this by allowing teams to perform minor, frequent updates that reduce the impact of changes on application availability and stability. Additionally, SRE teams use CI/CD tools to perform change management and continuous testing to ensure the successful deployment of code alterations.
DevOps principles: Accept failure as standard.
The SRE and DevOps concepts deal with errors and failure as inevitable occurrences. While DevOps tries to handle runtime errors, SRE enforces error management through Service Level Commitments (SLx) to ensure all failures are handled.
DevOps principle: Leveraging tools & automation
DevOps and SRE use automation to improve workflows. Still, SRE enables teams to use the same tools and services through flexible APIs. While DevOps promotes the adoption of automation tools, SRE ensures every team member can access updated technologies.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Practices
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) improves overall uptime, as the approach focuses on keeping a platform or service up and running in any situation. Tasks like disaster prevention, risk mitigation, reliability, and redundancy are of the utmost importance. The SRE team’s primary goal is to find the best ways to prevent problems that can cause downtime on large-scale systems. Another benefit is that SRE helps organizations eliminate manual work, giving developers more time to innovate.
Figure 2 SRE Key Practices
DevOps and SRE are two sides of the same coin. Hence the same tools and techniques are commonly used by both. In the software planning phase, tools used are; Slack and Jira . Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, and Chef are used for Configuration Management. For Version Management, GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab are utilized. Monitoring is performed using Splunk, Kibana, and Prometheus. Incident Reporting System utilizes PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and VictorOps.
DevOps and SRE focus on application lifecycle management but have different responsibilities. Over the years, both DevOps and SRE have become essential elements of software development and operations processes. Both methodologies aim to enhance the end-to-end cycle of an IT ecosystem—the application lifecycle through DevOps and operations lifecycle management through SRE.
Platform as a Service is a cloud development and deployment environment with the resources organizations need to deliver anything from basic cloud-based apps to complex enterprise applications.
A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing environment that combines public and private cloud resources. The primary benefit of this type of configuration is the ability to provide access to the services of both public and private.
© Arcana Info 2015-2024. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions
© Arcana Info 2015-2024. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy
Terms and Conditions
