SRE: How the role is evolving

The growth of site reliability engineering (SRE) has demonstrated the need for SRE implementations, and SRE is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Below, we’ll describe SRE, the roles of an SRE team, SRE principles, the SRE practice, and how SRE will continue to evolve.

What is SRE?

SRE, like DevOps, is an IT approach that aims for more efficient and stable accountability regarding application reliability. An SRE team solves tasks that traditionally require the manual support of an operations team and automates those tedious processes with SRE tools.

SRE professionals create more reliable, scalable, and manageable systems and applications. Things that have been historically difficult to oversee, like managing large networks through code, are now more sustainable for engineers who handle thousands of machines.

Principles of Site Reliability Engineering

The principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) were pioneered by Google decades ago. Google SRE set the standard for how SRE is practiced in the industry today. SRE principles focus on the intersection of software engineering and operations, emphasizing automation, reliability, and efficiency in managing large-scale, complex systems. These principles have since been widely adopted by many leading tech companies to ensure the reliability and scalability of their services. These principles include the following tenets:

1. Establishing clear, measurable goals with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for system uptime and performance.

2. Prioritizing automation to streamline processes and reduce manual errors.

3. Focusing on monitoring, observability, and feedback loops to improve system reliability.

4. Promoting a culture of shared responsibility for system reliability and performance.

5. Implementing change management to minimize disruptions and ensure system stability.

What do SREs do?

Site reliability engineers require some experience in software development, operations, and/or IT sysadmins roles. They’re responsible for configuring, deploying, and maintaining code and ensuring software systems' smooth functioning by focusing on system performance and change management.

Site reliability engineers, rather than working in opposition to a DevOps engineering team, provide a more proactive form of quality assurance. By taking on both responsibilities, site reliability engineers bring together the skillsets of a DevOps team and operations team, drawing a bridge between the two fields.

A common way to differentiate between a DevOps engineer and an SRE engineer is to think of DevOps engineers focusing on the application development pipeline while SREs take those applications and focus on reliability, scale, and maintenance.

Reliability engineers are often asked to help developers overwhelmed by operational tasks and could benefit from the more specialized operations skill set.

Common roles and responsibilities for a Site Reliability Engineer

So, how exactly does an SRE’s skill set fit into a DevOps team? Some common roles and responsibilities for a site reliability engineer might include:

• Building software to help operations and support teams

• Ensuring the availability and reliability of critical business systems

• Create sustainable systems and services through automation and uplift

• Fixing support escalation issues

• Optimizing on-call rotations and processes

• Documenting industry and experience knowledge

• Conducting post-incident reviews

• Own and operate services that organizational applications rely on to serve customers

• Evaluate, select, and integrate key technologies that help provide automated solutions

• Audit and secure services across development, tests, and live environments

Most site reliability engineers need coding experience beyond simple scripts, and you should look for engineers who take a proactive approach to identify problems to build software around.

SRE: how the role is evolving

Easier adoption and implementation

Despite SRE’s growth, not all IT teams have adopted or implemented SRE into their models. Internal growth within organizations and more space for SRE teams will be the next step in increasing the use and adoption of SRE functionality.

Segmented SRE departments and more collaboration

SRE departments have been limited to a few specialized experts responsible for building software that solves problems for a while now. However, with increased user demands and increasingly complicated technical stacks, SRE teams have to cover several different areas and domains. This demands SRE departments to further segment into individual specializations with other relevant departments.

Risk mitigation

SRE teams learn from their shortcomings and seek further risk mitigation by creating new structures based on their previous vulnerabilities. SRE teams will inevitably become more dependent on maintaining quality performance, reliability, and business stability, which means risk mitigation will become a major focus in SRE’s near future.

More focus on user experience

SREs have a unique opportunity to influence the user experience because their role is central to application optimization and stability. In addition to application and network maintenance, SRE teams can provide valuable insights into the user experience by tracking key metrics like repeat user purchases or user abandonment rates within various points of the user journey map.

Career path

There’s no predetermined or “typical” career path for Site Reliability Engineers. After a few years of experience, an SRE should strive to become a senior, staff, or principal SRE. As DevSecOps practices develop, some SREs expand their focus on reliability to extend into security principles. They may also end up leading teams, establishing AIOps practices, or eventually becoming CIOs.

Because the path to simply becoming an SRE is multi-faceted—people can come from dev, security, sysadmin, or ops roles—many often find themselves at a crossroads between becoming developer engineering leaders, security engineer leaders, or IT operations leaders when their experience warrants it.

How Sumo Logic can help

Site reliability engineers need machine data tools like Sumo Logic to ensure the reliability and availability of their applications and various components or services in production. Sumo Logic provides engineers with a unified platform to troubleshoot quickly and remediate issues before customers are impacted.

Try Sumo Logic for free today.