DevOps and SRE: Where agility meets reliability

If you’re wondering what Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is, you’ve probably skipped our first post of this series. In this article, we will look at how SRE differs from DevOps. 

If you’re wondering what Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is, you’ve probably skipped our first post of this series. In this article, we will look at how SRE differs from DevOps. 

There is a significant overlap between the two concepts. Both tend to address the silos between development and operations teams. In terms of practices followed, there are a lot of parallels. However, the approach and objectives are quite different.

• Agility first vs. reliability first: 
  The main goal of DevOps is to increase business agility – how do we release new features faster? How do I get my defect fixes in production sooner? This is largely done through cross-pollinating development and operations teams and aligning their processes to mutual goals. These goals are met through processes and automated pipelines that move code faster to production and staging environments. 
  The objective of SRE is to ensure that while business agility is pursued, it doesn’t come at the cost of overall reliability of the system. This is typically achieved using a separate central team. 

• Failure tolerance levels: 
  DevOps looks to ensure there are no failures, while SRE accepts that failures are inevitable. Instead, SRE focuses more on ensuring the continued availability of core business services with minimal impact through chaos engineering and destructive testing practices. 

We have seen several cases recently, where, despite complete DevOps implementation, companies continue to bleed millions of dollars when their core systems go down – SRE will help plug that gap.

Another aspect worth mentioning is the scope of SRE. While the DevOps concept focuses on bridging the gap between development and operations teams, SRE extends that by also focusing on architecture and business. This ensures system resiliency is built in by design to react to and recover from unexpected disruptions.

Next, let’s talk about AIOps and SRE. To find out if there are any differences and what those differences may be, read our next blog post here.