What Is a Site Reliability Engineer? Should You Become One?

And perhaps most importantly, the SRE will drive changes to team processes and culture. The engineers who execute processes or modifications to the infrastructure or systems. When a high-priority page triggers, the engineer will investigate and diagnose the issue. The SRE might also pull in additional engineers or software developers if necessary. And the SRE works to resolve the issue to bring the service back up. We also need to ensure that systems and infrastructure work properly.

For Treynor, SRE is the result of allowing a software engineer to structure the subsequent operations functions — effectively creating a NoOps environment. Companies employing this https://wizardsdev.com/ method include Dropbox, Mozilla, Netflix and LinkedIn. SRE teams are in charge of proactively building and implementing services to make IT and support better at their jobs.

What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do?

If you are interested in becoming an SRE, you should definitely consider it! The demand for these types of engineers is only going to grow in the future. SREs need to have a good understanding of IT operations, support and software engineering in order to be successful. As a result, they often have a broad skill set that allows them to work with a variety of teams and technologies. The site reliability engineer career path typically starts with a few years of experience in website administration or operations before moving into a role as an SRE.

They then use their problem-solving skills to write code and code tests while planning how to deploy and eventually upgrade their software. Their ability to solve problems and be strategic in their thinking is invaluable to an SRE team. With this in mind, SRE teams measure, and test, and explore their systems.

site reliability engineer

DevOps gained popularity in order to combat siloed workflows, decreased collaboration and a lack of visibility across the software development lifecycle. The site reliability engineer role itself combines the skills of development teams and operations teams by requiring an overlap in responsibilities. Site reliability engineering is a software engineering approach to IT operations. SRE teams use software as a tool to manage systems, solve problems, and automate operations tasks. Focuses on the reliability of behind-the-scenes systems that help make other teams’ jobs more efficient. These are often confused with “Platform” teams or “Platform Operations” teams.

SRE also relies on a foundation designed for a cloud-native development style.Linux® containers support a unified environment for development, delivery, integration, and automation. When coding and building new features, DevOps focuses on moving through the development pipeline efficiently, while SRE focuses on balancing site reliability with creating new features. However, SRE differs from DevOps because it relies on site reliability engineers within the development team who also have an operations background to remove communication and workflow problems.

Define Service Level Indicators and Objectives

According to payscale, this type of engineer makes a salary anywhere between $76,000 to $158,000 a year in the United States with the average being $117,768 per year. As mentioned above, the SRE will require knowledge of coding and most of the common programming languages including Ruby, Javascript and PHP. Non-Abstract Large Scale Systems Design with a focus on reliability. Toil management as the implementation of the first principle outlined above.

They have a portion of the responsibility range, but without the insights that working across a set of major roles provides. Instead, they are treated like the on-call engineers instead of being on-call part of the time and working on other aspects of the project during the other part of their time. It’s harder to develop quality SRE-style results with this implementation. Quality assurance and testing engineers create and implement strategies for finding flaws and problems before software is deployed to production systems. They are experts at automation, at designing tests, and at imagining potential problem areas and attack vectors. Their goal of ensuring consistent product quality marries well with the SRE goals and their experience helps them fit in to SRE teams quickly.

Common tools used by SREs

Employers are also looking to hire SRE team members who have experience in data-driven analysis and infrastructure-as-code as well as server clusters, load balancing and monitoring. Other desirable SRE skills are experience with at least one major cloud provider and one container technology. Site reliability engineers create a bridge between development and operations by applying a software engineering mindset to system administration topics. They split their time between operations/on-call duties and developing systems and software that help increase site reliability and performance.

• Additionally, SREs work closely with development teams to ensure that new features and services are designed and deployed in a way that meets the reliability and performance goals of the organization.
• One interesting development in the enterprise space is that some companies create DevOps teams and include people on those teams with the SRE title and the typical “keep the site running and available” job description.
• You’ll need someone to take point on facilitating and coordinating the actions of all involved.
• Teams know that unexpected failures happen and that we should expect nothing to have perfect 100% uptime.
• Stephen Gossett wrote in Built In that some companies have rebranded their operations teams to SRE teams with little meaningful change.
• The industry needed people who could increase the reliability and performance of this system.

Like traditional operations groups, we keep important, revenue-critical systems up and running despite hurricanes, bandwidth outages, and configuration errors. To learn more about how Dynatrace enables SRE with “shift-left SLIs,” join us for the on-demand performance clinic Automated SRE-driven performance engineering with Dynatrace. A service level objective is the percentage at which a company expects a service to run properly. Whatever the route, grace under uptime pressures, a knack for streamlining out mundane, repetitive tasks and a diplomatic streak are all site reliability engineering prerequisites.

Manage Incidents

These practices help organizations meet service level agreements for availability, performance, user experience, and business KPIs. Acloud-nativedevelopment approach—specifically, building applications asmicroservicesand deploying them incontainers—can simplify application development, deployment and scalability. But cloud-native development also creates an increasingly distributed environment that complicates administration, Site Reliability Engineer operations and management. An SRE team can support the rapid pace of innovation enabled by a cloud-native approach and ensure or improve system reliability, without putting additional operations pressure on DevOps teams. How can an SRE ensure they are delivering software faster than before and maintaining systems uptime and performance? Site reliability engineers must monitor all components of the product or system.