SRE and DevOps are trending buzzwords, especially in the startup ecosystems. What exactly are these? What is the difference? How should a company organize these activities to make them work?
First, let’s take a look at how DevOps relates to SRE. There are a lot of possible definitions for these notions, but to make it simple let’s say that DevOps relates to the building and delivering of apps whereas SRE is all about already running apps.
Let’s look at different activities from the point of view of DevOps and SRE.
In the software lifecycle, DevOps is about identifying application blind spots or lack of flexibility when building the app: is my application able to be updated without downtime? Is it built with helpful and consistent logs? Whereas SRE intervenes after the application is deployed to try to ensure maximum uptime.
Considering the incremental changes, DevOp’s focus is on deploying these changes as safely and quickly as possible, building a continuous deployment platform to achieve this goal. SRE is more about the application resilience to frequent changes, measuring their impact with key metrics.
Finally, DevOps try to anticipate failure conditions whereas the SRE playing field is post-failure situations, applying root cause analysis to improve the long term reliability.
Of course, DevOps and SRE are skills or ways of thinking that intersect.
Implementing DevOps and SRE in companies
There are many ways a company may organize these activities. Let’s see a few of these models.
The simplest way: the Platform team
People with DevOps or SRE skillset are not so common on the market, finding and hiring such people is quite hard. Consequently, only a few of these profiles are available to companies.
Due to this relative scarcity, small and big companies alike often rely on a unique, central **Platform Team **as the by default organization.
This team has thefollowing responsibilities**:**
- Building and operating the infrastructure.
- Administrating “DevOps” tools: building services to ease up developers productivity
- “SRE” activities: ensuring observability and performance of deployed applications
The global platform team
In such a team, DevOps and SRE activities are handled by the same people, which are distinct from the feature team producing the application code.
#startup #sre #software #infrastructure #devops
