Site Reliability Engineering

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

October 7, 2021 comments off

In the current era organizations are using “application value” as a new form of currency in the software-first world.

Any businesses that delivers a product or service to its customers and clients through applications – application security, reliability and feature velocity is the utmost important things for them.

As applications are increasingly important to for the modern ogranizations, so do for the software engineering teams as well.

Today, software development has become faster and more complex as these days, they need to release features every other day and they need to handle all the infrastructure too without having latency, outage, and any other performance issues, and maintaining that uptime is a constant struggle for every organization.

But organizations who have effective SRE processes and skilled SRE professionals have much easier transition of workflows from development to production and who are increasing the reliability and performance of the systems. When incidents occur, they have a faster mean time to acknowledge and repair them. Which ultimately results less time fixing production issues and all teams — developers, SRE and operations — can focus on delivering business value in their particular disciplines.

So, often software engineers tend to have these questions on their mind that “What are the roles and responsibilities of a site reliability engineer?”

We are going to see those responsibilities today:

Building solutions to help operations and support teams:

Site reliability engineers needs to create and implement solutions that helps IT and support staff do their jobs better. This can range from building a new tool to shoring up weaknesses in software delivery to adjusting existing monitoring tools to changing code in production.

Fixing support escalation issues:

Initially, site reliability engineers spend time fixing support surge cases, which decreases as system reliability improves. Due to their diverse skill set and experience, site reliability engineers have the necessary expertise to address issues with the appropriate people and teams.

Optimizing on-call rotations and processes:

Site reliability engineers are typically expected to be available during an incident, giving them much to say about optimizing the on-call process to improve system reliability. SRE teams can add automation and context to alerts to improve collaborative incident response, as well as update runbooks and documents to help on-call teams prepare for future incidents.

Documenting knowledge:

SRE teams are involved in almost every aspect of the software development life cycle, which gives them a wealth of historical knowledge about services and processes. Site reliability engineers can then regularly iterate on their learning and maintain runbooks to provide engineering teams with the information they need when they need it – a benefit that increases management and facilitates trust between teams.

Conducting post-incident reviews:

SRE teams are tasked with ensuring that software developers and ITOps professionals are conducting blameless reviews, documenting their findings and putting what they learn into action. Site reliability engineers are also responsible for any post-incident action items that involve building or optimizing part of the SDLC or incident life cycle.

Next Step

One of the keys to improving your services and site reliability, and system uptime, is by educating your team about the SRE concepts and implementation process. However, as an emerging domain, it is crucial to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to SRE as different origanizations will require different implementations.

This is where you can realy on DevOpsSchool SRE consulting services, we help our clients and participants to learn and implement SRE process as well as we offers SRE corporate training, SRE tailor-made workshops, SRE consulting solutions, and SRE Corporate trainers, consultants and mentors who can help you to successfully implement SRE in your organization.

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Mantosh Singh
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