In my recent project experience, I understood customer is more looking for SRE than a just DevOps Engineers. Obviously, I knew there were few similarities but what where the actual differences is what confused me, so thought writing a brief article just describing the basic differences between them.

I think the primary difference between the both is around whether you oversee the WHAT or the HOW. Where the former relates more to DevOps Engineer and latter to SRE.

DevOps

So, what I understand is that DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and operation teams allowing them to build, test, and release, monitor software faster and more reliably. DevOps builds a culture of collaboration between teams that historically functioned in relative silos. It also benefits to include increased trust, faster software releases, ability to solve critical issues quickly, and better manage unplanned work.

SRE

There is a book by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff & Niall Richard Murphy called as Site Reliability Engineering, it provides his view on what SRE means, how it works, and how it compares to other ways of doing things in the industry. Basically stating "what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations".

According to Wikipedia, "SRE is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems.

Differences

For me both sounds pretty much similar which is causing most of the confusion.

There seems to be a thin line between DevOps & SRE where the former defines the overarching principles of WHAT the development team should expect from operations and vice-versa, allowing understanding how their work influences the other. DevOps does not define the HOW of this process and this is where SRE comes in. So for me there is this thin line between both of them.

One could equivalently view SRE as a specific implementation of DevOps with some idiosyncratic extensions.

Summarizing

1. SRE is a role where DevOps is more of a culture. Latter defines WHAT needs to be achieved and former defines HOW it can be achieved.
2. SRE's practice DevOps since they are focused on aspects on HOW, like availability, monitoring, and scalability.

Sunil Khatri

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