Photo Source: Canva.com

In terms of digital technology, DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams work hand-in-hand to roll out new features and upgrades quickly. This is done to meet continuously evolving business needs and challenges. Within the production environment, SRE also provides safe, reliable, and resilient scalable applications based on need, ensuring the best user experience. This blog examines the differences between SRE and DevOps underscoring the importance of both to a company's success.

SRE vs. DevOps: Which Is Better?

SRE Explained

SRE is an abbreviation for site reliability engineering. It is a relatively new field that combines the concepts of operations and development in order to build and run reliable systems. SRE is a concept that integrates various aspects of software development and applies them to specific IT operations. The main objective of SRE is to develop a highly reliable and ultra-scalable software application or system.

SRE engineers share ownership of the products and services with developers using the same shared set of tooling for the production systems. With both teams engaging in a culture of collaboration through contribution, and with reliable automation tools, you can ensure high performance to get the job done. Here are some of the key aspects of SRE teams:

• Work together to define SLI, SLO, and SLA depending on the nature and need of the product.
• Make an error budget.
• Implement a blameless post-mortem approach.
• Deploy in small iterations that are easy to review, and roll back if needed to reduce the cost of failure.
• Look continuously for automation.

The primary focus of DevOps is to enable continuous delivery with a regular release rate and an automated approach to application development. In DevOps, the principles are abstract ideas (i.e., philosophy) because they vary between organizations contingent on feasibility and what works best for them.

While the DevOps movement is focused on bringing the development and operations teams together, SRE is focused on creating a reliable system that can be operated and scaled.

Key Differences Between SRE and DevOps

The main difference between SRE and DevOps is that SRE is more focused on the system as a whole, while the DevOps approach is more focused on the individual applications. SRE is about creating a system that is scalable and reliable, while the goal of DevOps is to ensure that individual applications can meet those same standards.

Another key difference is that SRE is more focused on the long-term, while DevOps is more focused on the short-term. DevOps is concerned with getting applications out the door as quickly as possible.

Overall, SRE and DevOps are two different ways of looking at the same problem. Neither SRE nor DevOps is a replacement for the other; however, they are not competing against each other either. They are co-existing software practices that break organizational barriers and deliver the best-performing software in the shortest possible time.

Nisum's Site Reliability Framework Makes Implementations Easy

What is site reliability in SRE? Site reliability is the practice of monitoring your system in a manner where you can detect and diagnose issues as they happen. It can be a challenge to maintain observability in a large and complex system and having reliable software is important for organizational success. But the benefits are clear; detecting and diagnosing issues as they happen allows you to fix them before they cause damage or downtime, and the sooner you can identify and fix an issue, the less impact it will have on your users.

How Nisum Can Help

Our proprietary Site Reliability Framework provides a proven approach that can monitor and visualize your metrics, generate alerts, and provide data analytics diagnosing issues as they happen to improve scalability, operational efficiency, and avoid system failures.

Results You Can Expect

• 15% increase in sales conversion
• Up to 50% reduction in operating expenses
• 80% reduction in resolution time (MTTR)
• 95% reduction in time to detect (MTTD)