Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well.

For our latest StackPod episode, we invited Hyke’s DevOps team lead and AWS Cloud architect: Yousef Sedky. Axiom Telecom is one of the largest telephone retailers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Hyke, its sister company, is a distribution platform for mobile products.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams and Platform Engineering teams share similar goals -- like maximizing automation and reducing toil -- and similar methodologies. But they have different priorities, and use somewhat different tools to achieve them. What are SREs, what are platform engineers and how is each role similar and different? This article explains.

Historically, there was a clear delineation between what system administrators (SysAdmins) do and what application developers are responsible for in IT organizations. In recent years—especially in organizations focused on software development—these worlds have come together as IT operations and development teams adopt DevOps practices. The concept of site reliability engineering (SRE) was first introduced by a much-discussed book titled Site Reliability Engineering from Google.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice was established by Google nearly 20 years ago, and was popularized with Google’s monumental SRE Book. Everyone’s been attempting to follow that iconic path ever since.

SRE (site reliability engineering) is a discipline used by software engineering and IT teams to proactively build and maintain more reliable services. SRE is a functional way to apply software development solutions to IT operations problems. From IT monitoring to software delivery to incident response – site reliability engineers are focused on building and monitoring anything in production that improves service resiliency without harming development speed.

Software developments take place quickly as per the client’s requirements. The developments need to take place with safety and precautions. DevOps engineers can help into this matter; however, it is not possible without Observability.

If you’re an SRE, you might view AIOps with great excitement. By automating complex workflows and troubleshooting processes, AIOps could make your life as an SRE much easier. Alternatively, SREs may choose to view AIOps with disdain. They might think of AIOps as just a fancy buzzword that doesn’t live up to its promises, and that can become a distraction from the SRE tools that really matter. Which perspective is right?

SREs and Devs are used to solving problems even when an awkward or inefficient way is the only way. In AppScope 1.0, SREs and Devs have a new alternative to standard methods, that the AppScope team thinks will make that problem-solving a lot more fun. We in the AppScope team constantly hear firsthand about life in the SRE trenches. For this blog, we “interview” a fictional SRE/Dev whose thoughts and comments are a mash-up of things we’ve heard from real people we know.