SRE Bootcamp Series — SRE vs DevOps
Roles
Site Reliability Engineer role and SRE team
A typical SRE team is composed of either software developers with expertise in operations or IT operatio
ns specialists with software development skills. At Google, such teams are usually a fifty-fifty mix of those who have more of a software background and those who have more of a systems background. Other companies form SRE teams by adding software engineering skill sets and approaches to existing operations practices and personnel.
Besides operations and software engineering, areas of experience relevant to the SRE role encompass monitoring systems, production automation, and system architecture.
All members of an SRE team share responsibility for code deployment, system maintenance, automation, and change management. And functions of each individual Site Reliability Engineer may change over time, depending on the current focus of the team — the development of new features or improvement of the system’s reliability.
DevOps Engineer role and DevOps team
Unlike an SRE team where each member is a kind of jack-of-all-trades, a DevOps team contains different professionals with specific duties.
The team structure varies from company to company and usually includesSRE & DevOps jobs (but is not limited to) the following specialists:
- a Product Owner who understands how the service should work to bring value to customers,
- a Team Lead delegating tasks across other members,
- a Cloud Architect building cloud infrastructure for smooth running of services in production,
- a Software Developer writing code and unit tests,
- a QA Engineer implementing quality methods for product development and delivery,
- a Release Manager scheduling and coordinating releases, and
- a System Administrator in charge of cloud monitoring.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of roles in DevOps. Quite often such a cross-functional team invites a Site Reliability Engineer to ensure the availability of services. Typically, when SREs work as a part of a DevOps team, they have a narrower range of responsibilities than in fully-committed SRE teams.
No matter the number and background of team members, obviously DevOps is not a role or person in contrast to SRE. However, as of writing this article, there were nearly 25,000 DevOps Engineer jobs posted on Glassdoor — which is comparable with almost 33,000 Site Reliability Engineers sought on the same website.
A brief examination of vacancies on Glassdoor reveals that background, responsibilities, and skills required for both jobs have a lot of overlap. It seems that employers often use these job titles interchangeably.
However, average yearly salaries are somewhat higher among SREs — thanks to the financial data submitted by employees working for tech giants like Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe, to name a few.
SRE vs DevOps tools: the same solutions do for both
Matthew Flaming, VP of software engineering at New Relic Application Software Monitoring, describes SRE as “the purest distillation of DevOps principles into a single role.” That being said, an SRE and DevOps toolset can be very much the same and typically include the following positions.
Containers and microservices facilitate creating a scalable system. So, Docker for building and deployment containerized apps and Kubernetes for container orchestration come as integral parts of SRE/DevOps toolchains.
CI/CD tools like Jenkins or CircleCI support the idea of gradual change, enabling teams to build, test, and deploy code faster.
Infrastructure as Code (IaS) tools correspond exactly with the “automate everything” concept. Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible are among the most widely-used solutions to automate infrastructure deployments and configurations.
Automated functional and non-functional testing in production can be performed with the help of Selenium, Zephyr, Nexus Lifecycle, Veracode, and other tools.
Resilience testing is essential to ensure the ability of the system to withstand real-life conditions. Popular options for this task are Chaos Monkey by Netflix, ChaosIQ, and Gremlin.
Monitoring systems play a crucial role in SRE and DevOps frameworks. Services delivered by Prometheus, DataDog, Broadcom, PRGT Network Monitor, and many other platforms allow for metrics-based continuous monitoring of network and application performance across cloud environments.
When do companies need DevOps and SRE?
Despite all the confusion and overlaps, one thing is pretty sure: SRE and DevOps are not conflicting factions, but rather two relatives working towards the same goal and with the same tools — but with slightly different focuses.
While SRE culture prioritizes reliability over the speed of change, DevOps instead accentuates agility across all stages of the product development cycle. However, both approaches try to find a balance between two poles and can complement each other in terms of methods, practices, and solutions. More on that in our video:
Depending on their size and goals, companies may implement different scenarios of DevOps, SRE, or even their combination.
SRE teams modeled after Google fit large tech-driven companies such as Adobe, Twitter, or Amazon that handle billions of daily requests and put the availability of their services before anything else.
DevOps culture and cross-functional teams benefit any business working in a highly competitive environment, where even a slightly shorter time to market gives a huge competitive advantage. Moreover, a DevOps team can be strengthened with a Site Reliability Engineer to monitor system performance and ensure its stability.
Some organizations have two teams — SRE and DevOps. The former is responsible for the support and maintenance of existing service while the latter creates and delivers new applications.
Smaller companies typically seek a person to manage cloud infrastructure and automate operations tasks, using different job titles for the same responsibilities — DevOps Engineer, DevOps Manager, Site Reliability Engineer, or even Cloud Engineer, or CI/CD Engineer.
No matter how large your company is, somebody in your organization probably already does the SRE job, promotes collaboration between developers and IT specialists, or writes scripts to automate time-consuming tasks. If you find these people and officially recognize their work, they can form the backbone of an effective SRE or DevOps team — whichever name you like more.
