What is a site reliability engineer and why you should consider this career path

Professionals in the reliability engineering field have reported great pay and a basic 40-hour workweek. The work-life balance is also reported to be substantial and fitting for most employees and their lifestyles. The annual senior site reliability engineer salary in the US is 116,046 dollars. In the United States, the site reliability engineer salary ranges from $78,901 to $90,101.

• Site reliability engineers improve the software development lifecycle by holding post-incident reviews.
• SREs also fix issues that arise with new releases to maintain the functionality of software products.
• To achieve this, site reliability engineers must have excellent communication skills and the ability to convert technical knowledge into business insights.
• SREs collaborate closely with product developers to ensure that the designed solution responds to non-functional requirements such as availability, performance, security, and maintainability.

In an optimally functioning SRE team, all engineers have just enough work to meet their talent and capabilities. However, resource changes, time off, and other disruptions can cause a workload imbalance. This is a critical challenge as SREs operate business-critical infrastructure that cannot tolerate even a day of downtime. In an environment of a staffing shortage, engineers tend to take on more work than they can handle, get distracted by routine and manual tasks, and spend less time on value-adding development.

Site Reliability Engineer responsibilities include:

Well, it’s practically a map that shows how you might advance from one job title to another. So, for example, if you started out with the role of maintenance manager you might progress to a role such as project manager eventually. Later on in your career, you could end up with the title corporate quality manager.

However, if the errors exceed the permitted error budget, the team puts new changes on hold and solves existing problems. Site reliability engineering roles and responsibilities are crucial to the continuous improvement of people, https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sre-site-reliability-engineer/ processes and technology within any organization. Whether your team has already taken on a full-blown DevOps culture or you’re still attempting to make the transition, SRE offers numerous benefits to speed and reliability.

Kitchen Sink, a.k.a. “Everything SRE”

DevOps is an approach to culture, automation, and platform design intended to deliver increased business value and responsiveness through rapid, high-quality service delivery. Once established, the development team is able to “spend” the error budget when releasing a new feature. Using the SLO and error budget, the team then determines whether a product or service can launch based on the available error budget. One of the site reliability engineer’s fundamental tenets is a “postmortem culture.” This means that one does not simply close an issue or incident after it is solved.

Services can range from production code changes to alerting and monitoring adjustments. The software-defined infrastructure has brought DevOps to prominence, which is a combination of tools, cultural philosophies, and practices that merge software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). DevOps aims to heighten an organization’s capacity to deliver services and applications at high speed, compared to traditional infrastructure management and software development processes. A cloud-native development approach—specifically, building applications as microservices and deploying them in containers—can simplify application development, deployment and scalability.

What does a site reliability engineer do?

While the roles of site reliability engineer and DevOps engineer may, at first glance, appear to be quite similar, there are actually a few keyways in which they differ. To effectively manage company services, you will need to have a deep understanding of various operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and macOS. This is because you will often be required to write code in order to automate tasks or build tools. However, SRE differs from DevOps because it relies on site reliability engineers within the development team who also have an operations background to remove communication and workflow problems. SRE teams determine the launch of new features by using service-level agreements (SLAs) to define the required reliability of the system through service-level indicators (SLI) and service-level objectives (SLO).

This skill will come in handy when dealing with unexpected outages or performance issues. One of the most important skills for any site reliability engineer is the ability to communicate clearly and concisely. This is because you will often need to relay important information about system alerts or outages to other members of your team. Version control tools such as Git are used by developers to share and manage code changes. As an SRE, you will need to be familiar with these tools in order to help developers with code deployments. Many companies today use distributed systems in order to achieve high availability and scalability.

By organization type

Instead of striving for a perfect solution, they monitor software performance in terms of service-level agreements (SLAs), service-level indicators (SLIs), and service-level objectives (SLOs). They observe and monitor performance metrics after deploying the application in production environments. DevOps gained popularity in order to combat siloed workflows, decreased collaboration and a lack of visibility across the software development lifecycle.

Similar to the point above, a site reliability engineer can expect to spend time fixing support escalation cases. But, as your SRE operations mature, your systems will become more reliable and you’ll see fewer critical incidents in production – leading to fewer support escalations. These focus on the reliability of behind-the-scenes systems that help make other teams’ jobs more efficient.

Eventually, site reliability engineering made a full-fledged entry into the IT domain, automating solutions such as capacity and performance planning, managing risks, disaster response, and on-call monitoring. Simply put, DevOps teams engineer continuous delivery till deployment, whereas SREs emphasize on maintaining uninterrupted operations from the beginning to the end of a software’s life cycle. Cloud-native applications are composed of microservices, packaged and deployed in containers, and designed to run in any cloud environment. Explore how applying AI and automation to IT operations can help SREs ensure resiliency and robustness of enterprise applications and free valuable time and talent to support innovation. The highly collaborative and technical role requires knowledge of coding and a knack for problem-solving.

In many cases, the root cause of an issue will be found in code or infrastructure changes that were made recently. As such, the SRE team needs to have a good understanding of both the codebase and the infrastructure in order to effectively debug production issues. Site reliability engineers split their time between operations tasks and project work. According to SRE best practices from Google, site reliability engineers can only spend a maximum of 50% of their time on operations—and they should be monitored to ensure they don’t go over. A full-stack developer is someone familiar with both the backend of development (e.g., servers and databases) and the frontend (e.g., the user client). Full-stack software development skills equip SREs with the ability to approach infrastructure management from different perspectives.