Guide/Roadmap to Become an SRE Engineer

If you want to how to become an SRE engineer or path to become an SRE engineer, then you need to understand, what exactly SRE engineers do? In SRE we try to use the principles of enhanced software engineering and apply them to the following problems:

1. How to manage your infrastructure?
2. How to manage your operations?
3. How to solve operation problems – like deployment, production releases, upgrades, any many more.

Today, software development has become faster and more complex work. In today’s digital world for many organizations, their application is their business. And for them, application performance and reliability are in top priorities and at the same time they need to release features every other day and they also need to handle the infrastructure without having any outages, latency, and any other kind of performance issues. To maintain maintaining that uptime continuously is a constant struggle for all the organizations.

This is where traditional software teams started having trouble keeping up with the pace. They need a modern approach to keep up the pace with the complexity and scale of modern software applications. This is where SRE concepts came into existence.

Site reliability engineers used to hire and be responsible for the reliability of the complete software development lifecycle, from the front-end, customer-facing applications to the back-end database and hardware infrastructure. They can easily detect and resolve issues more efficiently than the traditional development and operations team or now DevOps team can do. Therefore SRE engineers’ tasks revolve around infrastructures, latency, outage, performance issues, and maintaining uptimes.

Now – If we will see what exactly they do to the above tasks:-

As demand for site reliability continues to grow, many companies list open SRE jobs that reflect both evolving challenges and new tech stacks. These listings give valuable insight into what real-world roles expect—helping candidates align their skills, certifications, and mindset with what’s most relevant in today’s fast-paced infrastructure and operations landscape.

• They first set a goal to create a highly reliable and scalable software system that can run with minimum failure
• They also share the ownership of the system with the Developers.
• They accepts the fact that failure can happen and prepare the system towards handling those failures
• They quantify the failures and availability of a system and track these against the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the system.
• They perform root cause analysis and perform post mortems of issues.
• They instill the concept of product ownership in developers by reducing the cost of failures.
• They try to automate non-productive tasks
• They measure various aspects like latency, SLA, failure counts, etc. of the system.
• They work with the mindset that any system operation can be a failure.

To become an SRE engineer – you need to go through below mentioned path:

• Learn how to Code
• Acquire in-depth knowledge of version control
• Get knowledge of Operating Systems
• Get familiar with cloud-native applications
• Build understanding of Distributed computing
• Become an expert on CI/CD process
• Acquire in-depth understanding of monitoring tools
• Acquire troubleshooting knowledge
• Be good in communication and buil collaboration skills

Based on the knowledge requirement, here is the list of required skills and toolsets for SRE engineers

1. Operating Systems – Centos/Ubuntu & VirtualBox & Vagrant
2. Cloud – AWS
3. Containers – Docker & Kubernetes – Helm
4. Planning and Designing – Jira & Confluence
5. Source Code Versioning – Git using Github
6. Webserver – Apache HTTP & Nginx
7. Configuration & Deployment Management – Ansible
8. Infrastructure Coding – Terraform
9. Services mesh Data planes & Control Planes – Envoy & Istio
10. Network configurations and Service Discovery – Consul
11. Continuous Integration – Jenkins
12. Securing credentials – HashiCorp Vault & SSL & Certificates
13. Infrastructure Monitoring – Datadog, Prometheus with Grafana
14. Log Monitoring – Splunk & ELK stake
15. Performance & RUM Monitoring – NewRelic
16. Emergency Response & Alerting & Chat & Notification SMTP, SES, SNS,Pagerduty & Slack – Pagerduty & Slack

Video tutorial to understand more about the SRE engineers’ roadmap

Best Course and Insitute for learning SRE

All of the above discussions are important to consider either when you are new to SRE or starting a new SRE team or improving the one you already have.

At DevOpsSchool, we offer our 10 Days Corporate SRE workshop for group of employees and for individuals 72 hrs of SRE certification course. We will run the SRE training program either onsite or online and offer private SRE corporate training in both formats. There are no prerequisites for our SRE course, as we are going to all things from scratch, recommended to individuals, prospective team members and IT leadership including CIOs/CTOs. Contact us to find out more and discuss about the SRE training and workshops.

Our SRE training program highlights the methodologies, practices and tools required to engage people involved in reliability and stability by using real-world scenarios and case studies. Professionals who complete this course will learn how to anticipate and control flaws in operational systems, making them more predictable, scalable, and stable, as well as providing opportunities for continuous development.

Attendees of DevOpsSchool SRE Certification program will gain a solid understanding of the concepts, principles, methodologies, and tools for putting in place a successful SRE system.

Mantosh Singh

MotoShare.in delivers cost-effective bike rental solutions, empowering users to save on transportation while enjoying reliable two-wheelers. Ideal for city commutes, sightseeing, or adventure rides.