Despite the fluctuations in the tech market, cloud-native technology seems here to stay — the global cloud-native application market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.7%, which puts it on track to reach a total of $17 billion by 2028.
This boom in cloud-native application development is creating new job roles and responsibilities ensuring that companies’ tech architecture and underlying systems are implemented in a way that is maintainable and sustainable.
As companies increasingly prioritize application performance and reliability, site reliability engineering (SRE) becomes essential to effectively manage the automation, observability and responsiveness necessary for rapid software deployments. Many industry leaders and advisors predict that SRE will continue to gain in popularity, with Gartner projecting that by 2027, 75% of enterprises will use SRE practices across their organizations.
If you’re interested in a career in IT, understanding site reliability engineering and the role of a site reliability engineer is advantageous. Read on to learn more about this increasingly important role.
What Is Site Reliability Engineering?
The simplest way to understand site reliability engineering is to think of it as a software engineering approach to IT operations.
Google introduced the SRE concept in 2003 when they realized their level of unprecedented growth made traditional operations management nearly impossible. So, Ben Treynor Sloss, the senior VP overseeing technical operations at Google, sought to engineer a solution that would act as an effective bridge between the development and operations teams to align incentives of different functions.
SRE applies software engineering practices and principles to create and maintain highly reliable, efficient and scalable software systems. For example, rather than having to manually repeat tasks, site reliability engineers (SREs) will engineer a solution so the computer does the work, freeing up those engineers to address other problems. Google explains that SRE teams are responsible for the “availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning” of the services they support.
Over the past 20-plus years since the term was coined, SRE has been widely adopted by other large tech companies to improve the reliability of their own systems.
What Are the Benefits of SRE?
By applying software engineering principles to system administration topics, SRE creates a more systematic and automated approach to managing complex systems. Here are a few ways SRE benefits software engineers and their organizations:
- More Efficient Problem Solving — SREs develop robust, scalable solutions to recurring problems, moving away from ad-hoc fixes toward sustainable, long-term improvements. This ensures systems are more resilient and less prone to failure.
- Reliable and Scalable Architecture — SREs design systems that maintain high availability even as they scale. This involves optimizing resource usage, minimizing waste and ensuring that systems can handle increased loads without compromising performance. This optimization not only supports growth but also helps maintain a balance between performance and expenditure.
- More Collaboration Between Development and Operations — SRE fosters closer collaboration between development and operations teams, leading to better communication, faster problem resolution and shared responsibility for system performance and reliability. This collaboration ultimately results in higher-quality software.
- Reduced Overhead and Risks of Errors — By identifying routine, repetitive tasks that can be automated, SRE reduces the manual overhead and human error associated with system administration. This not only improves efficiency but also frees up engineers to focus on more strategic initiatives.
- Increased Reliability and Uptime — SRE teams are dedicated to preventing and mitigating incidents before they impact users. By continuously monitoring systems and implementing proactive measures, SRE helps increase reliability and uptime, ensuring that services are consistently available and functional. This focus on reliability contributes to a better user experience and, in turn, enhances customer satisfaction, brand reputation and revenue.
- Continuous Improvement and Innovation — SRE fosters a culture of continuous improvement. By regularly identifying areas for enhancement, SRE teams drive ongoing optimization and innovation within the organization. This iterative approach ensures that systems evolve to meet changing demands and remain competitive.
- Consistent Performance — Predictable and consistent performance is essential for user satisfaction and operational efficiency. SRE focuses on ensuring that systems perform as expected under varying conditions, which is critical for building trust with users and stakeholders.
- Improved Security and Compliance — By integrating security practices into the development and operations lifecycle, SRE teams help safeguard systems against vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of security breaches and ensuring adherence to security regulations.
- Reduced Costs — SRE can significantly reduce operational costs by automating routine tasks and optimizing resource usage, leading to cost savings without compromising on performance.
Why Is SRE important?
Bottom line: There’s always room for improvement. The growth of cloud-native environments makes it easier for development teams to release incremental updates and fixes. The fast-paced IT landscape demands immediate responses to security risks, changing customer expectations, new features from competitors and any number of similar concerns. SREs engineer automated solutions that handle more of the smaller, manual tasks so that they can focus on larger issues.
However, today there’s also an expectation that systems can achieve — if not zero downtime — something close to a 99.99% uptime. Large enterprises can lose billions, or even trillions, of dollars when their systems go down. This demand for reliability, combined with an expectation of new services and applications, ensures a constant need for SRE teams.
Because SRE is a constantly evolving discipline, it provides software engineers the opportunity to build new methods and processes into the delivery pipeline, adapting to the constantly changing expectations and demands of today’s IT industry.
What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do?
General Role
SREs balance operations and development work to prioritize a system’s stability, reliability and performance. They aim to design scalable solutions for operational challenges and create processes that allow applications to self-correct or enable users to resolve issues independently. Their primary focus is maintaining the uptime of critical systems, even during unforeseen incidents, bandwidth outages, configuration errors or emergencies.
SRE teams are expected to be on call to swiftly respond to incidents and work proactively to prevent outages. They use service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) to guide the launch of new features and ensure systems meet reliability standards. SRE teams are highly collaborative and will support development and operations teams as needed.
Job Responsibilities
Specific SRE job responsibilities will vary based on the job, company or industry. Some example responsibilities include:
- Solving Complex System Problems — SREs find scalable and technically feasible solutions to complex system challenges. They develop and maintain the tools and systems necessary to manage a company’s digital infrastructure, ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently.
- Monitoring Systems and Alerts — SREs are responsible for monitoring the digital infrastructure. They set up tools and systems to detect potential issues before they escalate into significant problems. SREs also configure alert systems that notify the right personnel when an issue is identified.
- Incident Response and Post-Mortems — When issues arise, SREs respond quickly to identify the root cause, develop and implement a resolution plan and escalate issues to the appropriate teams when necessary. After incidents, SREs conduct post-mortems to evaluate what went wrong and how to improve future reliability.
- Implementing Automation — SREs create automated processes for various operational tasks, such as deployments, monitoring and infrastructure management, to reduce manual intervention and improve efficiency.
- Capacity Planning — SREs manage capacity planning to ensure the digital infrastructure can meet an organization’s current and future needs. This involves analyzing usage patterns and predicting the capacity required to support growth.
- Collaborating and Creating Documentation — SREs work closely with other teams to ensure infrastructure is reliable, scalable and secure. They also create documentation that provides easy access to information for other teams, ensuring smooth operations and knowledge sharing across the organization.
Get more details about a career as a site reliability engineer — including related career opportunities, salary ranges and job opportunities — on our blog post: How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer [+Career & Salary Guide].
How Does SRE Relate to DevOps?
Both SRE and DevOps prioritize delivering services faster through cultures that bridges the gap between development and operations teams. While they share some similarities and responsibilities, SRE and DevOps positions differ in focus — operating in different areas with distinct scopes:
- DevOps aims to move software through the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline as efficiently as possible. As such, DevOps is generally more concerned about the speed of delivery for application changes and will release small changes more often.
- SRE’s focus is on maximizing a system’s reliability and stability, so it is more concerned about solving problems to keep systems stable while supporting the fast changes made possible by DevOps.
How do SRE and DevOps work together?
SREs and DevOps engineers both aim to improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks. They may collaborate to set up monitoring and logging systems to track application performance, proactively detect issues with the system, automate processes and provide faster incident response and more effective troubleshooting.
Together they work to improve service quality and reliability, quicken the development life cycle and reduce the time needed for application development.
What are the differences between SRE and DevOps?
The biggest difference is that DevOps teams prioritize solving development problems to optimize Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery and will build solutions to cater to business requirements. SREs are more concerned about solving operational problems across the software development life cycle, such as production failures, security concerns or infrastructure issues. Their priority is always to maximize resilience, scaling, reliability and uptime.
SRE vs. Platform Engineer
Platform engineering and site reliability engineering both involve creating and maintaining systems in cloud-native environments. However, where SREs are focused on system reliability and scalability, platform engineers create stable and consistent developer-centric platforms.
What are the differences between these two roles?
SREs focus more on operational reliability, while platform engineers are more concerned about enabling efficient development processes. SREs assist IT operations teams, helping them use software as a tool to manage systems, solve problems and automate operations tasks. Platform engineers will work more closely with development teams, creating and maintaining platforms that help developers manage systems, solve problems and automate tasks within the development process.