Does Your Business Need a Site Reliability Engineer?

There has always been a subtle conflict of interests in DevOps teams. While some will excel in the development part of IT operations, others will mainly concentrate on the day to day operations, all which bring about their own flaws. If you choose to concentrate on operations and IT system performance, you will never improve your site or application.

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On the other hand, if you focus all your attention towards development, you might miss common flaws in your infrastructure, leading to costly downtimes. Luckily, with site reliability engineers (SREs), you can get to concentrate on both aspects of your business. In a world where only 29% of IT implementations flourish, according to Information Age, this can help reduce the rates of failure for your IT department.

Here is what SREs do and why you should consider working with them:

Who Are Site Reliability Engineers?

Simply put, site reliability engineers are software engineers tasked with the role of assessing the reliability and performance of company systems as development continues. Typically, they give the go-ahead for the development team to unleash any new tweaks they may have for an application or site.

This is way better than having the DevOps teams look for ways to circumvent current vulnerabilities with the idea of creating new tweaks on a massive scale – which in most cases results in some downtime. Ideally, the SREs are the guys who will be responsible for using monitoring tools such as Log management tools to identify flaws in your current system.

Google Is the Pioneer of SREs

The tech giant that is Google has its hands in multiple pies. From web applications to driverless cars, their list is endless, which makes maintaining the reliability of all these assets critical. As the company continued to scale upwards, they needed to ensure that their new products remained in tip-top shape, and that’s how the term site reliability engineer was born.

Over time, these engineers have played the role of both development and monitoring new systems. Today, Google has more than 1,500 engineers working in their SRE department.

New Launches Will Depend On the SLA

Typically, it is tough to have an application with a 100% uptime. As such, an SRE will offer the Development team a service level agreement that the current system needs to attain in order to launch any new tweaks. For instance, the SLA may need them to achieve 99.9% of perfection, leaving the team with an error budget of 0.1%.

In case the team maintains the uptime of the current system at the agreed upon SLA or at a better level, then the SRE team will give them the green light to launch new tweaks. Otherwise, they will not allow any changes until the development team can work on eliminating system vulnerabilities.

SREs Can Code Too

There has always existed a battle between Dev and Ops teams in that developers can only make new changes while Ops concentrate on the reliability. Luckily, SREs fit the shoes of both job specifications, only that they are required to spend close to 50% of their time on reliability monitoring. As such, every SRE you hire helps eliminate the need for an extra member of the development team and vice versa.

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In case the SRE department is in a dry spell for jobs that need to be done, you can simply shift SREs to the development part of the business. This knowledge level of SREs also increases the level of collaboration between them and the development team as they understand the system as much as the development team does, with them having more knowledge in some instances.

Conclusion

Business upgrades should never be given priority over reliability. Working with SREs helps ensure that both business growth and reliability can coexist. Consider working with such a team to improve customer satisfaction.