What is the difference between Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps Engineering?

As time goes on, and as the cloud industry gets bigger and bigger, there are seemingly more roles and career options for you to choose from every day.

With all of these roles being discussed and advertised, it can be extremely difficult to decide which role you are best suited to and which role you should aim toward based on how you want to grow your career.

If you don't know what to aim toward, because you don't know different job roles, how are you supposed to acquire the correct skills to enable yourself to land your role? In this blog post, we aim to dispel any confusion regarding the difference between two rather similar roles, Site Reliability Engineers and DevOps Engineers.

First of all, let's start with what is Site Reliability Engineering?

Site reliability engineering is a broad yet defined set of principles and practices that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operational problems. The SRE serves as a bridge between the IT operations and software development teams and their main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems.

An SRE will effectively work with Software Development teams to make sure that a company's IT systems are scalable, predictable, and performative. The definition and implementation of an SRE role have only served to further improve Software Development and infrastructure implementation generally as an SRE can focus on the operations using tools that Software Developers are also familiar with.

What problems does an SRE in your team solve?

Often software development teams can be siloed from operational teams, which can cause headaches in the short term regarding problem-solving, but it can also cause long-term cultural issues within a company that is harder to fix. SREs aims to be the glue to hold these teams together.

SREs can also (depending on your outlook) gain greater job satisfaction as they’re constantly making a direct impact on customer experience. In fact, if you’re looking for a role designed to help customers the most within the cloud industry – then SRE is it. This customer obsession can in turn provide massive value and guide businesses to adapt and grow quicker, as they are giving more direct value to each customer.

So what skills are required to be an SRE?

These skills can be broadly broken down into two categories, technical skills, and non-technical skills.

Technical Skills:

• Strong technical troubleshooting skills
• Deep Operating System knowledge ( Linux most likely)
• Version control experience (Git)
• Knowledge of a Cloud Provider, and a command-line and automation programming language

Non Technical Skills:

• Team player
• Communicative
• Ability to dive deep to understand what is going on
• Rapport building

Does this sound like DevOps to you? It is similar to DevOps for sure, and SREs should be used in combination with DevOps, but now let's discuss what exactly DevOps looks like - and then can explore specific similarities and differences.

What is DevOps Engineering?

DevOps is probably the biggest buzzword in the cloud computing industry right now. Many people talk about DevOps without even stopping to consider what it means and the benefits it can provide.

DevOps stands for Developer (Software Developer) and Operations, and DevOps itself is a set of tools and methodologies which brings together these separate areas. DevOps means automation, consistency, and rapid and iterative development for applications. DevOps engineers use a multitude of tools during their workday (some of which you may be familiar with) and the main goal of DevOps is for fast and iterative development which can shorten the Software Development Life Cycle. DevOps is a methodology that your business needs.

DevOps can be summed by its main principles, listed below:

1. Break down silos

2. Accept failure, and fail fast

3. Introduce change gradually

4. Leverage tools and automation

5. Measure everything

Skills Required for a DevOps engineer are as follows and again consist of technical and non-technical skills.

Technical skills include:

• Continuous delivery processes
• Cloud knowledge (AWS, GCP Azure, etc, and Cloud Concepts)
• Observability. tooling
• Infrastructure as code like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform
• Configuration Management tooling - Think Jenkins
• Containerisation - Docker, and Kubernetes

Non-Technical Skills are as follows:

• Communication & collaboration
• Ability to explain a difficult concept to the non-technical candidate
• Strive to continually strive and learn more

Given this list, there are a number of similarities between DevOps and SREs, but there are of course distinctive differences where the two fields do not necessarily overlap.

The main difference between DevOps and SRE is that SRE is more practical, DevOps is more philosophical, and DevOps is the theory SRE puts into practice.

Truth be told the roles are not different ideologically, they both aim to achieve the same thing - and that is building better software in a more iterative and secure way.

See our comparison of the two roles side by side below:

I hope you have enjoyed reading about the differences between DevOps and SREs - and I hope it has given you some insight into which career you may end up choosing!

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