Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Setting up Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is one of the foundational tasks of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, giving the SRE team a target against which to evaluate whether or not a service is running reliably enough. The inverse of your SLO is your error budget — how much unreliability you are willing to tolerate.

Whether you’ve heard of or fully jumped on the DevOps or SRE bandwagon, you may have also wondered how the two relate. What’s the difference? Are they really just different ways of looking at the same problem? The term DevOps hit the market first, but SRE wasn’t too far behind. And though they have different origin stories, they both focus on autonomy, automation, and iteration. So why do these paradigms exist? And why do we need both? Let’s look at this further.

To embed or not to embed: That is the question. At least, that’s one of the questions that companies have to answer as they decide how to implement Site Reliability Engineering. They can either embed SREs into existing teams, or they can build a new, separate SRE team. Both approaches have their pros and cons. The right strategy for your company or team depends, of course, on your needs and priorities.

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.