SRE vs DevOps Tasks

The roles of an SRE and DevOps Engineers look similar from a bird’s eye view.

However, they both work with different goals in mind. A DevOps engineer focuses on speed and agility, while an SRE is always looking at the availability and reliability of the site.

To better understand its differences, consider an instance wherein the DevOps team is planning to develop and launch a web application.

When it comes to the application lifecycle, a DevOps engineer handles:

✅ Application design
✅ Development
✅Infrastructure configuration

They also ensure that the app is properly deployed to the production environment and performing as per the defined metrics.

In this process, a DevOps Engineer creates cross-functional teams to facilitate shorter and faster release cycles, with every member sharing the responsibility throughout the product life cycle.

An SRE takes over from here and ensures the infrastructure is properly functioning:

✅ First, the SRE team creates Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to measure the system/site performance.

✅ They run the application under normal operating conditions, note down the performance levels, and then run it under heavy loads to identify the acceptable performance degradable level.

✅ After that, they prepare Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on these values. When the team receives a warning that the performance level is getting closer to the SLA value, they immediately respond and revert it to a healthy condition.

✅ The SLOs are also used to prioritize reliability work. For instance, fixing performance issues of a service that is not meeting the SLO is prioritized over optimizing the performance of an app running at the SLO level.

While a DevOps engineer designs and implements DevOps in an organization, an SRE always sustain it to deliver optimal performance.

So, a collaboration between these two professionals is important to deliver improved results to clients.

The following image gives a more detailed explanation of these tasks.

DevOps vs SRE, which one do you prefer? Feel free to share your thoughts!

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