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.