The Importance of Site Reliability Engineering

Amanda Allen
2 min readJul 14, 2022

Corporate giants like Google, Microsoft, Walmart, or Amazon can lose trillions of dollars every second their systems are down. Hence, they need to fix the system to ensure redundancy, seamless customer experience, and fault tolerance.

The apt answer to this challenge is Site Reliability Engineering, which is also known as SRE. So, now the question is — what is SRE?
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) builds a bridge between IT operations and development teams by streamlining complex tasks that were previously performed by operations. Generally, these engineers use various automation tools to eliminate issues by crafting reliable and scalable software systems.

So what is a site reliability engineer. An SRE engineer is primarily responsible for DevOps automation and standardization, especially when systems migrate to the cloud. Thus, they have great hands-on experience in software engineering or system administration with IT operations.

A site reliability engineer typically has a software development background and some operations and business analytics knowledge. These things become required in order to address operational challenges with the help of code. While DevOps culture focuses on automating IT processes, SRE teams focus more on planning and design.

They keep track of production systems and analyze their performance to identify areas for improvement. Their observations also aid in calculating the probable cost of disruptions and developing contingency plans.

They bifurcate their time between on-call and operational tasks, as well as design systems to improve site reliability and performance. Therefore, according to Google, SREs should not spend more than 50% of their time on operations, and any breach of this criterion indicates system ill-health.

The demand for site reliability engineers is rapidly increasing in various organizations. It’s a challenging role that requires both coding knowledge and automation skills. While some organizations may run away from trendy roles and technologies, SREs are important players in building better IT services.

Having such engineers in your organizations will surely make your process smoother and reduce your costs while enhancing the reliability of your software. Therefore, Radixweb is the right place to hire dedicated developers who can help you with DevOps and the best SRE practices.

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Amanda Allen

I have expertise in web development, software development, web based solutions working with an offshore outsourcing IT company.