The software development life cycle has come a long way — from a non-overlapping development model — the to an iterative development model like and . It’s interesting to notice that before the beginning of the DevOps movement (~2007–2008), SRE was born at Google (2003) to build the reliability and resiliency of the entire Google Infrastructure. Waterfall Model, Agile DevOps In its SRE book, Google described how the collaborative efforts of DevOps engineers, SRE, and other engineers like Application Security engineers are vital for maintaining a product like Gmail. Looking at the above example, it is safe to say that our growing dependency on applications has propelled the widescale adoption of DevOps and SRE. Whether it’s to streamline our business functionalities or launch an app that simplifies our life, we need reliable and scalable systems at every step. What is DevOps? DevOps defines a software development approach with a shift in organizational culture towards agility, automation, and collaboration. It aims at eliminating siloes and bridging the gaps between the different departments of development and operations. In this process, the code development goes through iterative steps — . Also popularly known as the ‘ ’ Continuous Development, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Feedback, Continuous Monitoring, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Operations 7Cs of DevOps Lifecycle. What is SRE? Site Reliability Engineering or SRE plays a more comprehensive role in streamlining the end-user experience and is more concerned with incorporating software development practices into IT operations. To put it simply, the SRE concept says that if a developer handles the task of IT operations, what are the places where automation can be brought into the picture. This means it expects to use automation as a means to fix many of the problems arising while managing applications in production. SRE uses three to measure the application performance - service level agreements — define the appropriate reliability, performance, and latency of the application, as desired by the end-user. Service level agreements (SLAs) — The target goals set by the SRE team to meet the expectations of SLAs. Service level objectives (SLOs) — to measure specific metrics ( ) to conform to the SLOs. Service level indicators (SLIs) like system latency, system throughput, lead time, mean time to restore (MTTR), development frequency, and availability error rate Similarities between SRE and DevOps Both methodologies are focussed on monitoring production and ensuring the operations management works as smoothly as expected. One of their fundamental principles is . It aims at bringing all the stakeholders (Dev team + Ops team) in the application development together. Believe in the model of ‘ and ‘ .’ breaking siloes shared responsibility shared ownership Their common goal is to the operations in the distributed system. simplify Differences and Interrelation between SRE and DevOps Development and Implementation DevOps focuses on building the core of the product. The core is why the product is developed in the first place. It works on the aspect of customer requirements — the different needs and specifications. Taking an agile approach to software development with the continuous process of build, test, and deployment. SRE teams narrow their focus around the fact of whether the core is really implemented. Whether the product is meeting the expectations of the customer. It monitors the metrics of the application performance and gives feedback to the DevOps team about the direction of changes that need to be implemented. Nature of Skills The DevOps team is more experimental in nature. They write codes and test them constantly for bugs or maybe for adding new features. They develop the core design of the product, give shape to it, and push it to production. The SRE team, on the other hand, is investigative in nature. They constantly monitor the concerned metrics and give feedback on the possible lines of improvement. They are concerned more with the experience of the end-user. They perform an analysis of every problem, to see its frequency, and find ways of automating the repetitive operations. Their goal is to find ways to in recurring instances of bugs. innovate Automation Be it DevOps or SRE, the sole purpose of their existence can be distinguished by the fact that they both aim at automating manual processes. It’s not about just saving time in terms of doing tasks but extends beyond the fact that anything done manually is . prone to errors When it comes to automation in DevOps, it means automating deployment (tasks and new features). However, automation in SRE is . They convert manual tasks into programmatic tasks to keep the tech stacks up and running. automating redundancy Goal Every set of tasks ever assigned has a goal associated with it. The goal of DevOps is to develop a template to drive activities towards collaboration. And SRE team focuses on formulating prescriptive measures to enhance the reliability of every deployed application. Commonly Seen Challenges Some prime areas where they face challenges are: Implementing different at different stages of pipelines to ensure errorless codes. CI/CD pipeline management: automated tests The core function is to help us in increasing the reliability of our applications. Gaining into the system will help in diagnosing the health of services and gaining vital analytics. Monitoring and Alerting: 360-degree visibility To understand the cause of service failures, the severity of a bug, or even to get alerted immediately when any requests start failing requires . Incident Management: prompt communication Taking everything into account Both and have a shared goal of and . SRE DevOps breaking siloed workflow, bringing automation to recurring manual tasks, incorporating constant monitoring ( , , etc.) Platforms BuildPiper Harness enabling managed microservices and managed Kubernetes help us in maintaining the lifecycle of applications, by addressing the aforementioned challenges. , a projection of . Looking at the data on managed services market size $ 274 billion by 2026, shows their potential in simplifying the manageability of applications With the global tech giants like , , and pioneering the , their has grown in . Furthermore, looking at their , it is evident that these methodologies are here for the long run. Google Amazon Netflix adoption of DevOps and SRE ROI leaps and bounds rarely-down robust infrastructure Also published . here
