What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Do? Your Guide

The SRE role lets software engineers play a part in how people and teams deploy and maintain software. It also lets them improve software to increase system reliability and performance. Monitoring and alerting are two essential processes for site reliability engineers.

It works by running scripts on remote machines and checking the output, so it can be used for many different types of operations, from installing software to configuring systems. This list can go on and depends significantly on the specifics of your organization. Naturally, the SRE tasks and approaches of a global organization running legacy mainframe systems will differ from the SRE tasks of an actively growing cloud-based app. A Site Reliability Engineer is a person who works to ensure that the systems and infrastructure of a company or organization are running smoothly and that they can handle any unexpected problems that might arise.

What are the roles and responsibilities of a site reliability engineer?

Senior data reliability engineers are often responsible for developing the strategy around building systems, processes, and workflows across distributed data teams and relevant stakeholders. Collaboration between developers, operations, and product owners enables site reliability engineers to define and meet uptime and availability targets. In an IT environment, people and processes are as important as software.

RCA is the go-to tool for any company dealing with a high level of emergency or demand maintenance. The first problem you will encounter when getting the process started is that people will want to do an RCA on everything! Take a step back and remember all the different ways you have learned to solve problems. Each tool requires a different amount of effort and each is designed to solve specific types of problems. Site reliability engineers play a critical role in seamless operations, earning an average base salary of $124,604.

Helping with the design and development of spare parts

To get an expert’s view on what site reliability engineers do, I asked our DevOps Activist, Andi Grabner. The senior site reliability engineer salary in India is ₹2,150,000 per year. A national average of £81,000 is the senior site reliability engineer salary in the United Kingdom. The annual senior site reliability engineer salary in the US is 116,046 dollars.

A site reliability engineer ensures that websites are more reliable, efficient, and scalable. They help create automated solutions to improve operational aspects of the site. As we continue to go online for more and more tasks in our daily lives, it’s increasingly important to keep these technologies up and running.

As with other initiatives, SRE may start with a single champion, but a mature SRE practice will eventually need buy-in from the top. The role of SRE in DevOps is to ensure that the apps and services that DevOps teams develop are available to end users when they need them. Although SRE and DevOps are often discussed together, they’re two distinct disciplines.

The concept of site reliability engineering, pioneered by Google, applies aspects of software engineering to operations with the goal of creating software systems that are highly scalable and reliable. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the role of the Site Reliability Engineer and some of the best practices for this role, including runbooks, incident response reports, postmortem reports, and root cause analysis. DevOps is recognized both as a practice and as a set of principles. DevOps as a practice is an approach to IT delivery that brings people, practices and tools together to eliminate the silos between development and operations teams. “Site reliability engineers use good practices around software engineering to provide resilient infrastructure and resilient services to their organizations and the people that actually deliver new applications,” he explains. He also notes that SREs often come from traditional operations roles, such as systems engineers who keep systems up and running.

Form a Team and Review Maintenance Procedures

Because of that, they can be tasked with performing root cause analysis . In these scenarios, reliability engineers can work closely with the maintenance team to design, test, and produce quality replacement parts that will improve the reliability of onsite assets. SRE practices require visibility and transparency across all services and applications within a distributed system. But measuring the performance and availability of distinct services in these environments is complex. To make the process more workable, Google’s SRE team developed the four golden signals, one of several frameworks for effective distributed systems monitoring that establish benchmarks indicating when a system is healthy. You can become an SRE regardless of your background in software or systems engineering, as long as you have solid foundations in both and a strong incentive for improving and automating.

The SRE role is ultimately responsible for maintaining systems’ uptime and reliability. We have been in the situation where changes are sent to production without our knowledge or worse, without following the guidelines set to deploy them. This is why a change management process is so important, and every developer must stick with the plan.

Site Reliability Engineer Hard Skills

Hiring in-house is great for staying in the closest possible touch and keeping careful track of your project progress. However, all these benefits come with related costs—you’ll have to pay SRE engineers salaries , plus the cost of any benefits packages you offer. This way, the SRE talent faces a constant influx of challenges and remains motivated to overcome them, gain experience, and grow as a professional. Besides, MSP customers pay for SRE expertise only while they need it and gain an immediate return on their investments by optimizing their IT operations and workflows. Naturally, the SRE talent market is very competitive, as global corporations are ready to pay six-digit salaries to avoid multi-million losses.

In this collaborative environment, you can work with others to solve issues while building your skill sets. As you gain experience and technical knowledge, you can often advance your career into more senior positions. Data trust is another critical “KPI” for data reliability engineers, but how do you actually measure it? For any company striving to be data-driven, measuring data downtime is essential.

However, we should also take into consideration that we must make the required analysis and then implement the changes to our service to prevent it happening again. Our effectiveness will be measured as a function of mean time to recover and mean time to failure . In other words, we must have our services up and running again as quickly as possible, and we must avoid any subsequent failure for as long as possible.

• The most important job for a data reliability engineer is to ensure high-quality data is readily available across the organization and trustworthy at all times.
• Most colleges and bootcamps offer training and classes remotely.
• Since this could be a very large task, SREs identify and measure a set of key reliability metrics to help them pinpoint the most important tasks and identify weak areas.
• Like most DevOps practitioners, Ortigoza points out that DevOps isn’t a job role, or something that a person performs.
• Stay up to date with the latest in software development with Stackify’s Developer Thingsnewsletter.

This will give you a foundational understanding of the back-end technologies that power software solutions. Especially if this is your first time hiring and or applying for the role, you may not have a general understanding of what questions to ask or expect to answer. A senior data reliability engineer for Equifax is responsible for the performance and reliability of data storage and processing infrastructure. Data reliability engineers at DoorDash must have experience working with various cloud and data technologies. Vocational schools provide intensive training and certifications in different aspects of site reliability engineering.

For a site reliability engineer, resolving the problem is only half of the job. To properly perform this analysis we should have all of the information that would ideally be contained in an incident response report. A Site Reliability Engineer is responsible for the availability, performance, monitoring, and incident response, among other things, of the platforms and services that our company runs and owns. I believe that IT operations will always exist in most medium to large enterprises. But I believe their type of work will continue to change because of the cloud, PaaS, containers, and other technologies.

Site Reliability Engineer Job Description

They also need to understand systems holistically and be open to new ways of moving them toward reliability. A chief concern of SRE is around reducing redundant human effort through automation. Site reliability engineers benefit from automated operations tasks like log analysis, performance tuning and many others. Located at the crossroad of Site Reliability Engineer software development and IT operations, site reliability engineers should be schooled in both areas. Software expertise enables SREs to wield various programming languages for writing code and automating tasks. With their additional experience in IT, SREs can then understand how to leverage automation for streamlining company operations.

An SRE expert must be able to design an infrastructure from scratch, and an in-depth understanding of Linux OS capabilities is a must. If you don’t want the hassle of managing your own team, outsourcing can be a smart option. You’ll need to find https://wizardsdev.com/ a reputable vendor, but once that’s done, you’ll be paying only for the service itself. A DDoS attack or a cybersecurity breach can be devastating for any business, so you should plan for contingency and have risk mitigation strategies in place.