What is Site Realiability engineering (SRE)?

Site Reliability Engineering is a software engineering approach to IT operations. 

Basically a set of principles and practices that collaborate the aspect of software engineering and then the work left is just to apply them to the operational problems. 

Let’s focus update on what are the key skills and what we need to work on to become a forthcoming SRE 

Coding Proficiency 

Though they are not going to work as a developer, working as an SRE requires the knowledge of languages such as python, Java and GoLang. Additionally, knowledge of other languages such as JavaScript and.net is one of the preferred requirements. 

It’s because the ones with proficiency in languages are more likely to understand what improvement can be done for a great reliability result. 

Love of Change 

Releasing new applications consistently is a requirement to remain competitive. A good SRE is always comfortable indulging in changes if required. 

Detective skills 

You must have detective skills so that you are able to investigate immediately if any performance issues. 

Automation Mastery 

Mastery in automation means that you have knowledge about the automation tools that are used to make the work more efficient. 

This helps to eliminate the manual work which saves the time and energy of the working professionals. 

Business Analysis 

SREs are highly responsible for analysing availability, mean time failures and the time that it’s going to take to get repaired. 

Comprehensive Tech Skills 

Tech skills are one of the essential requirements to become a site reliability engineer. 

This includes the knowledge of operating systems, networks, virtualisation acumen and CI/CD pipeline tools. 

How Google came up with Site Reliability Engineering  

Though Google earned much popularity by the year 2000. But in 2003 as soon as Benjamin Treynor Sloss joined Google, the introduction of SRE in Google made it the most popular search engine. 

As one of his first tasks, he was asked to run a production team of seven engineers. He previously had a good experience as a software engineer. Surabhi maida commendable strategy to manage the group the way he wanted it to work, keeping himself at the position of a Site Reliability Engineer. 

SRE ensures that the services that Google provides(may it be internally or externally) have solidity, sureness and a fleet improvement. 

SRE plays a crucial role in monitoring the capacity and performance of the system. 

SRE vs Platform Engineering 

The work of a platform engineer is to operate a common platform for the whole technical team by building internal workflows and tools. 

Their main purpose is to provide a smoothed experience of development and deployment to every employee involved. 

A platform engineer is mainly required to manage the micro services, container orchestration and similar other roles. 

The responsibility of a platform engineer should never be compared by the Devops team. Though they are similar in some ways but they differ in others. 

NOW, talking about the confusion that people mostly have for  SRE playing the same roles platform engineers do. 

No, these are two different roles.  

The Site Reliability Engineer is responsible to deliver infrastructure to make the applications highly reliable. 

Whereas, the role of a platform engineer is to deliver the infrastructure to increase the growth rate of application. 

And these two roles collaborate to unlock the productivity of the application development team. 

Conclusion 

So now you must have understood what SRE is. 

When you ask a software engineer to design an operational team, the way he will complete the task will be the one that SREs do. 

I hope the concept of SRE with Google and the rowl of Platform Engineering together with SRE is clear to you.