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Site Reliability Engineering: An Imperative in Enterprise IT - Part 2

Heidi Carson
Pepperdata

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well.

Start with: Site Reliability Engineering: An Imperative in Enterprise IT - Part 1


Site Reliability Engineer vs. DevOps Engineer vs. Software Engineer

Site reliability engineers are development-focused IT professionals who work on developing and implementing solutions that solve reliability, availability, and scale problems. On the other hand, DevOps engineers are ops-focused workers who solve development pipeline problems. While there is a divide between the two professions, both sets of engineers cross the gap regularly, delivering their expertise and opinions to the other side and vice versa.

Site reliability engineers keep their services running and available to users, DevOps cover the product life cycle from end to end with the goal of making all processes continuous based on Agile technologies. Delivering continuity across the product life cycle is key to speeding time to market and implementing rapid changes.

While the roles of site reliability engineer and software engineer overlap to a certain extent, there are major differences between the two professions. Software engineers design and write software solutions. In most cases, software engineers factor in cost of deployment as well as application update and maintenance to their designs.

An SRE is not a developer who knows a thing or two about operations, or an operations person who codes. It's an entirely new and separate discipline on your development team. The SRE brings expertise in deployment, configuration management, monitoring, and metrics. SREs focus on improving application performance, freeing up developers to focus on feature improvements and IT operations to focus on managing infrastructure. When SREs are actively engaged, developers and IT operations have the latitude to do what they do best.

What is The SRE Framework?

The Site Reliability Engineering Framework is built on the following principles.

Codified best practices. This pertains to the ability to carry out what works well in production to code. Using the said code will result in services being “production ready” by design.

Reusable solutions. Common techniques that are easily shared and implemented, allowing for effective mitigation of scalability and reliability issues.

Common production platform with a common control surface. Identical sets of interfaces to production facilities for easy operational management, logging, and configuration for every service.

Easier automation and smarter systems. Superior automation and data aggregation provide engineers and developers a complete picture of their systems, applications, including all relevant information. No more manual data collection and analysis from different sources.

SRE creates various framework modules that serve as implementation guides for the solutions designed for a particular production area. An SRE framework essentially directs engineers on how to implement software components as well as a canonical way to integrate these components.

SRE frameworks provide engineers and developers multiple benefits in terms of efficiency and consistency. For one, they free developers from having to find, piece together, and configure individual components in an ad hoc service-specific manner.

These frameworks deliver a single solution for production concerns that's reusable across various services. Framework users execute their production and other processes using common implementation rules and minimal configuration differences.

Heidi Carson is Product Manager at Pepperdata

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Site Reliability Engineering: An Imperative in Enterprise IT - Part 2

Heidi Carson
Pepperdata

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well.

Start with: Site Reliability Engineering: An Imperative in Enterprise IT - Part 1


Site Reliability Engineer vs. DevOps Engineer vs. Software Engineer

Site reliability engineers are development-focused IT professionals who work on developing and implementing solutions that solve reliability, availability, and scale problems. On the other hand, DevOps engineers are ops-focused workers who solve development pipeline problems. While there is a divide between the two professions, both sets of engineers cross the gap regularly, delivering their expertise and opinions to the other side and vice versa.

Site reliability engineers keep their services running and available to users, DevOps cover the product life cycle from end to end with the goal of making all processes continuous based on Agile technologies. Delivering continuity across the product life cycle is key to speeding time to market and implementing rapid changes.

While the roles of site reliability engineer and software engineer overlap to a certain extent, there are major differences between the two professions. Software engineers design and write software solutions. In most cases, software engineers factor in cost of deployment as well as application update and maintenance to their designs.

An SRE is not a developer who knows a thing or two about operations, or an operations person who codes. It's an entirely new and separate discipline on your development team. The SRE brings expertise in deployment, configuration management, monitoring, and metrics. SREs focus on improving application performance, freeing up developers to focus on feature improvements and IT operations to focus on managing infrastructure. When SREs are actively engaged, developers and IT operations have the latitude to do what they do best.

What is The SRE Framework?

The Site Reliability Engineering Framework is built on the following principles.

Codified best practices. This pertains to the ability to carry out what works well in production to code. Using the said code will result in services being “production ready” by design.

Reusable solutions. Common techniques that are easily shared and implemented, allowing for effective mitigation of scalability and reliability issues.

Common production platform with a common control surface. Identical sets of interfaces to production facilities for easy operational management, logging, and configuration for every service.

Easier automation and smarter systems. Superior automation and data aggregation provide engineers and developers a complete picture of their systems, applications, including all relevant information. No more manual data collection and analysis from different sources.

SRE creates various framework modules that serve as implementation guides for the solutions designed for a particular production area. An SRE framework essentially directs engineers on how to implement software components as well as a canonical way to integrate these components.

SRE frameworks provide engineers and developers multiple benefits in terms of efficiency and consistency. For one, they free developers from having to find, piece together, and configure individual components in an ad hoc service-specific manner.

These frameworks deliver a single solution for production concerns that's reusable across various services. Framework users execute their production and other processes using common implementation rules and minimal configuration differences.

Heidi Carson is Product Manager at Pepperdata

Hot Topics

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...