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Are you unsure whether you need DevOps or SRE consulting? In this article, we’ll delve into the differences between the two to give you a clearer understanding and help you determine which one suits your needs best.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps practices are both very effective approaches towards managing and maintaining complex software systems, but the two are not mutually exclusive. They do overlap in a few key areas and ultimately share many objectives and principles.
Humans depend on engineered systems to perform their daily tasks. You will find site reliability engineering being performed across various sectors, ranging from household, aviation, and cars to mobile phones and websites. Our lives have been largely constructed by software engineers who have designed reliable software systems and brought their ideas to the marketplace.
Whilst engineered systems have many benefits, they also bring risks. The focused questions that you should ask are: how do you know your operations system is safe and reliable? How do you know the plane won’t crash? In the SRE DevOps space, the question to ask is: how do you know the site won’t crash? It does not matter how well-sophisticated systems and sites have been designed, failure in system reliability always lingers.
SRE is weighted more towards system reliability and availability, whereas DevOps more closely focuses on speeding up software delivery and is more geared towards shifting cultural practices, ensuring that development and operational teams are working collaboratively at all times.
SRE consulting teams are primarily responsible for designing and operating, often large and intricate systems, in an attempt to reduce downtime and improve the overall user experience. DevOps consulting teams are responsible for the entire software development lifecycle, from design through to development and eventual deployment.
A further distinction between the two emerges when we look at how they use metrics. SRE consulting focuses more heavily on metrics related to system reliability, such as uptime, latency, and error rates, whereas DevOps consulting has a greater emphasis on metrics related to software delivery, such as lead time, deployment frequency, and mean time to recovery.
Being two separate entities, SRE and DevOps also employ different toolset. SRE uses tools such as continuous monitoring, automated testing, and incident response systems. DevOps, on the other hand, uses tools including continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, configuration management tools, and platforms which facilitate greater levels of collaboration.
In the case of SRE DevOps, reliability means:
Once the solution is implemented, it never goes away. This means you don’t have to worry about backups and provides you with confidence that your system is reliable if a problem in the future occurs. Once the problem shows up, you have engineers that know the SRE DevOps system and can come in and provide a fix.
For clients, Site Reliability Engineering has two benefits. The first is from a strategic point of view that your system is reliable and built by highly experienced engineers who are able to provide solutions quickly. Secondly, from a monetary point of view, it allows you to be ahead of your competition and outperform your peers.
DevOps is an established set of practices that aims to improve and manage software development processes around the collaboration of software developers and IT operation teams. This can be done by accelerating the delivery of higher-quality software, breaking down silos and automation.
Site Reliability Engineering is focused on the implementation, design and automation of systems to ensure their resilience, reliability and scalability instead of system administrators.
These differences affect various day-to-day elements such as operations, goals, main focuses, approaches, tools and use cases:
Operations: DevOps works with product development and SRE works with operations.
Goals: DevOps aims to automate deployment such as tasks and features whereas Site Reliability Engineering automates redundancy such as manual tasks into programmatic tasks to ensure the stack's reliability.
Main focus: DevOps centres around development and product management, meaning the team structure can consist of a wide variety of roles such as product owners, developers, engineers and even SREs. Whereas SRE teams work on the development and operations of product management.
Approaches: DevOps takes an agile approach to software development and focuses on the core development of products or applications to provide solutions. Responsibilities include testing, building, deploying and monitoring applications with the prioritisation of speed and continuity. DevOps writes, tests and pushes code out to production. SREs are more analytical and investigative if things fail.
Tools: DevOps teams use automation tools such as Chef or Puppet in staging and production. In SRE, engineers scripting languages like Python or Bash.
Use cases: Usually, DevOps is used on agile software development projects; Site Reliability Engineering is applied to lean infrastructure practices.
This improves functionality and value provision to foster a collaborative atmosphere across the entire production cycle. Most organisations that have not adopted this methodology require a culture and mindset shift to focus on responsibility and shared control of business outcomes.
The underlying concept of SRE is the automation of supervision for massive software products using more sustainable and long-term solutions instead of user intervention, especially with increasing organisational digital transformations.
As many businesses realise the significance of these roles within a digital culture, developers are highly in demand. They provide numerous benefits such as security, improved network performance from SREs and collaboration from DevOps.
For lots of engineers, shifting through and eliminating "toil" is one of the more cumbersome and least valued manual processes. Through constructing, improving and constructing automation sequences, SREs and DevOps Engineers alleviate this strain to make engineers' jobs more interesting.
This produces more reliable and accurate code in addition to eliminating silos between operations and software teams. Both approaches can be very effective in improving software reliability, scalability, delivery, and collaboration.
For cost-effective assistance, we recommend seeking expert help from an IT consultancy firm that specialises in SRE consulting and DevOps consulting and offers fully tailored solutions to meet your precise needs.
WeShape can assist with a wide array of technical challenges, our associates are experts in SRE DevOps, Kubernetes, Cloud, IT, Digital, and more. Visit our DevOps services page and case study hub to find out more.
Our mission is to provide expertise on demand, at scale, to solve the hardest technical and organisational challenges to deliver continuous and lasting value and have a positive impact on all stakeholders.
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