DevOps VS SRE – Runnel Blog

SRE (short form of Site Reliability engineering) is a way of service management where engineers use a software engineering approach to run a production system. Benjamin Treynor is the originator of the term SRE. He used this approach on Google in 2003.

DevOps is a way to shorten the application development life cycle and provide continuous delivery by combining the Development team (Dev) and operations team (Ops). This term was introduced in 2009.

SRE and DevOps are different from each other.

How are they different from each other?

Silos: Large organizations have a complex structure. A lot of teams work in silos. It creates communication problems and a high cost. It makes the members unmotivated.DevOps helps to reduce silos. It combines the teams with a shared vision. SRE doesn’t think about how many silos there are. It is concerned about getting everyone to discuss by using the same tools and techniques in the whole company.

Failure: DevOps accepts failures as a regular thing. Though DevOps work is to handle and cope up with issues before the crash, they think it as a process of learning and growing whenever they fail. On the other hand, SRE’s job is to make sure to reduced errors as much as possible, even if it means they can learn something. For this, SRE uses different formulas to balance failures and accidents.

Automation and leverage tooling: SRE and DevOps both help to automate. Their goals are to add automation using DevOps tools. Thus they decrease manual work. But SRE brings long term value than DevOps.

Monitoring: As SRE and DevOps are both automated, they need continuous monitoring. Teams have to make sure everything is moving in the right direction. For this, they have to measure everything accurately. The difference is that SRE thinks operation is a software problem, which creates different ways for them to measure everything.

Implementing gradual changes: Companies are trying to improve faster than before. They are trying to cope up with new technologies and updating their products. Both SRE and DevOps helps to move quickly. DevOps deliberately do improve while SRE reduces the cost of failure.

Though DevOps and SRE are different from each other, they are considered as the two sides of a coin. As DevOps talks about what has to be done, SRE tells how it can be done. Both of them create a bridge between the development team and the operation team to reduce the gap in different ways.

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