SRE - Introduction

Introduction

The sysadmin approach to Service Management

The system administrator approach involves assembling different existing software components and deploying them to work together to produce a service. 

Sysadmins are then tasked to run the service and responding to events and update as they occur. Because sysadmins role requires a different skill set than the product's developer, these they are divide into two teams, "development" and "operations" or "ops".

Site Reliability Engineering approach

The SRE team focuses on hiring software engineers to run products and to create systems to accomplish the work that would otherwise be performed, often manually by Sysadmin. 

SRE is what happens when you ask Software Engineer to design an operations team.

60% of the SRE members are Software engineers and the other 40% are engineer with some software engineer skill set with in addition had a set of technical skills that is useful to SRE but rare for most software engineers. Expertise like UNIX system, networking, database

Common to all SREs is the belief for developing software systems to solve complex problems. Diverse background of the SRE team frequently results in clever, high-quality systems.

The result of our approach for hiring for SRE is that we end up with a team of people who will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand and to have the skill set to necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work.

SRE team ends up sharing the intellectual background with the rest of the development organization. 

Fundamentally, the SRE team is doing work that has historically been done by an operation team but using engineers with software expertise. 

Site Reliability Engineering - New Journey

 It has just happened. Inside, I knew I would need to evolve into a different kind of engineer, I was shyly overlooking what projects not related to my work were delivered, the importance of how those compared to mine, and how company-impact were systems used by many and not just by myself. I was eager to explore new concepts, techniques, mechanisms, frameworks and politics. The opportunity arose, and I understood it would have changed my life completely and it prompted in front of my eyes that I could restart and begin a new career path. I'm still a vertical Database Admin but I shifted left (or right) into another path. I discovered more interesting systems and concepts in the last two years as an SRE Engineer Manager than in the last years as a DBOps, where I strived to learn but I didn't run any relevant project. In my current job role, I have many opportunities to learn, share, and interface with others and I really want to catch the experience that will draw my future. 

Therefore, I began to build my SRE pillars and I decided to read the Site Reliability Engineering book written by SRE Engineers years ago. These posts are not intended to replace the book but these will be my thoughts on the book's paragraphs and sections. I want to take you, readers, into my journey to explore what would be an SRE.