SRE x DevOps x DevOps Engineer — Does this comparison even make any sense?
First, we should start by defining each. And I will try to do this in the easiest and simplest possible way.
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
It is a compound of software engineering techniques used for:
- Automate tasks
With an objective:
- Deploy and Maintain productive systems running smoothly, secure, and reliably
Think of bugs… they happen, right? The SRE team has the job to create automated tasks to not only prevent those bugs to happen but to auto-mitigate them, to auto-generate logs, auto-heal, and automatically trigger a message to the responsible person to see if everything is going OK whenever a threshold gets hit, auto auto auto. Everything needs to be automated.
In other words, SRE are nerds bug killers
DevOps
It is a culture where the company leadership approximates dev and ops teams in the ambit of communication, integration, collaboration, and automation.
The goal is:
- Create, Deploy, and Maintain productive systems running smoothly, secure, and reliably
The approach:
- Reduce silos between dev and ops teams.
Imagine one team knows the infrastructure and this manager is worried about the system running reliably, the other manager is worried only about the security, and the last one is worried about the software running smoothly.
The focus is on having someone capable of implementing DevOps in this scenario, and this person is normally called a DevOps evangelist. This person's job is to reduce the silos between teams and improve the quality of the system.
DevOps Engineer
Now, what the heck is this? Well, first you need to understand that in our field, some roles are always changing, and new roles are being created all the time (ex: Platform Engineer, a whole different thing).
As you understand by now, DevOps is a culture, and as soon as we needed to hire people who understand the DevOps culture and are capable of implementing automation, there was a beautiful name that came to mind… DevOps Engineer. But the thing is:
SRE already implements the automation behind the DevOps culture
OK, now let’s cut the crap.
When you see the image above, you read Dev Ops, I see SRE.
Conclusion
You should be worried to understand the difference between DevOps and DevOps engineering.
DevOps = all the Culture involving the SRE foundations plus the delivery, and the focus on the collaboration of the teams, communication, and integration.
DevOps Engineer = the person who will implement the automation to make things work smoothly, reliably, and safely = SRE.
Complete your learning
Read SRE books as well, they mention DevOps (it is free by Google):
On this link from IBM, you can see that other experts think DevOps Engineer and SRE are the same:
Here you understand how Microsoft sees it:
