DevOps vs SRE vs Platform Engineering
What are the key differences between these 3 roles?
The Spider-Man pointing meme is from a 1967 episode of the Spider-Man cartoon titled “Double Identity”. In the episode, Spider-Man tries to subdue Charles Cameo, a villain who impersonates others while committing crimes. Today, this meme has been widely used since 2011, often to mock people or groups who claim to be different but act similarly.
In the software development world, we often hear developers use the term SRE, DevOps and Platform Engineering. Lets dive into the key differences between these roles.
My background
Back in 2013, I moved from a software engineer role to a DevOps role at Pearson NCS. As the product I supported grew and reached a wider audience, my role evolved into a Site Reliability Engineer. In 2022, I joined Pixar, where I am currently working as a Platform Engineer. This article draws upon my experiences in each of these roles.
DevOps
Bridging Development and Operations
DevOps, coined by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer in 2009, is a practice that bridges the gap between Development and Operations teams. It fosters a culture where these traditionally separate teams collaborate throughout the software development lifecycle. DevOps aims to break down the silos between development and operations teams. The primary goal of DevOps is to enhance collaboration and communication, enabling organizations to deliver software more rapidly, efficiently, and reliably. By automating processes and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, DevOps practices help teams to:
- Monitoring and Feedback: Implement robust monitoring and feedback loops to continuously improve the system.
- Agile Practices: Integrate Agile methodologies to enable iterative development and faster delivery cycles.
- Security Integration: Embed security practices into the development and deployment processes (DevSecOps) to ensure compliance and protect against vulnerabilities.
- Performance Metrics: Track and analyze performance metrics to identify bottlenecks and optimize system performance.
A prime example of DevOps in action is Amazon’s “You build it, you run it” principle, where teams responsible for building software also deploy and maintain it, significantly accelerating feature delivery to users.
The most significant company that
SRE
Ensuring Reliability and Performance
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations problems. Introduced by Google, SRE focuses on creating scalable and highly reliable software systems. SRE teams are responsible for:
- Monitoring and Incident Response: Use advanced monitoring tools to detect and respond to issues promptly, minimizing downtime.
- Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Indicators (SLIs): Define and track metrics to maintain system reliability.
- Automation of Operations: Automate repetitive tasks to reduce operational toil and increase efficiency.
- Capacity Planning: Ensure systems can handle anticipated load increases through careful capacity planning.
- Blameless Postmortems: Conduct post-incident reviews to understand failures and prevent recurrence.
- Chaos Engineering: Simulate failures to test system resilience and improve reliability.
- Error Budgets: Balance innovation and reliability by allocating a tolerable error rate.
- Performance Tuning: Continuously optimize system performance and resource utilization.
- Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Maintain comprehensive documentation and promote knowledge sharing across teams.
Platform Engineering
Building the Foundation
Platform Engineering involves designing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure that supports software development and deployment. Platform engineers create self-service platforms that enable development teams to focus on building features without worrying about the complexities of the underlying infrastructure. Key responsibilities include:
- Self-Service Platforms: Create interfaces and APIs allowing developers to deploy and manage applications independently.
- Scalability: Ensure infrastructure scales efficiently to meet demand.
- Resilience and Recovery: Implement disaster recovery and backup solutions for data integrity.
- Observability: Provide logging, monitoring, and alerting systems for platform performance visibility.
- Interoperability: Support multiple technologies and integrate with various tools.
- User Experience: Design intuitive interfaces for developers.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly update the platform based on feedback and best practices.
Clearing the Misconceptions
While DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering have distinct roles, they are interconnected and often overlap.
- DevOps is not a specific role but a cultural shift aimed at improving collaboration and automation across teams.
- SRE is a specialized role within the broader DevOps framework, focusing on reliability and performance.
- Platform Engineering provides the foundational infrastructure and tools that enable DevOps and SRE practices.
About the author: I’m passionate about improving the way we develop and release software, and have written a couple of articles about this. I enjoy contributing to the open source community and have developed a collection of open source development tools that provide software developers, devops and site reliability engineers the additional means to develop, test, and deploy their applications.This article was inspired by Alex’s presentation.
