In this final article that concludes my series about best practices for effective site reliability engineering (SRE), I cover some of the practical applications of site reliability engineering.
There are some significant differences between software engineering and systems engineering.
Software engineering
- Focuses on software development and engineering only.
- Involves writing code to create useful functionality.
- Time is spent on developing repeatable and reusable software that can be easily extended.
- Has problem-solving orientation.
- Software engineering aids the SRE.
Systems engineering
- Focuses on the whole system including software, hardware and any associated technologies.
- Time is spent on building, analyzing, and managing solutions.
- Deals with defining characteristics of a system and feeds requirements to software engineering.
- Has systems-thinking orientation.
- Systems engineering enables SRE.
The site reliability engineer (SRE) utilizes both software engineering and system engineering skills, and in so doing adds value to an organization.
As the SRE team runs production systems, an SRE produces the most impactful tools to manage and automate manual processes. Software can be built faster when an SRE is involved, because most of the time the SRE creates software for their own use. As most of the tasks for an SRE are automated, which entails a lot of coding, this introduces a healthy mix of development and operations, which is great for site reliability.
Finally, an SRE enables an organization to automatically scale rapidly whether it's scaling up or scaling down.