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SRE vs. DevOps: Key differences and how they work together
Site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps help businesses accelerate product releases while improving product reliability. The primary difference between SRE and DevOps is the focus. SRE focuses on delivery and the stability of the production environment, while DevOps focuses on the end-to-end application lifecycle.
But businesses don’t have to choose between SRE vs. DevOps; they can complement each other. Companies that use both ensure that highly specialized areas, such as security, meet industry standards while maintaining a holistic approach to developing and operating applications.
This guide will review the key differences between SRE and DevOps and how businesses can leverage both for optimal performance.
What is SRE?
SRE is responsible for overall operational resilience. It strives for continuous business system functionality by using a systematic approach to delivering products and services.
Companies measure SRE success with service-level indicators or SLI, that track error rates against expected results. SRE team members can span both system admin and developer roles, which help efficiently manage incidents in the production environment. This results in data-driven decisions that improve overall reliability.
Key principles
SRE aims to enhance automation of repeatability and predictability, increase scalability for growth that doesn’t interrupt service, and ensure reliability. SRE team members can function as hybrid system admin/developer resources and focus attention where it’s needed when it’s needed. They can identify issues as well as fix them. SRE helps development and operations teams work together more effectively to achieve common goals through their ability to move fluidly between the two areas.
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What is DevOps?
DevOps aims to automate and integrate software development and IT operations processes. It has become a popular alternative to the siloed development and operations teams of the past. DevOps creates a collaborative, multidisciplinary approach that accelerates software delivery and improves overall efficiency. It focuses on solving development problems and supporting business requirements.
Open DevOps integrations provide the tools teams need to develop, deploy, and operate software. Teams can build the toolchain they want using a variety of vendors and native integrations, such as Jira Software, Bitbucket, Jira Service Management, and Confluence.
Key principles
DevOps approaches business problems with collaboration, automation, and integration.
One of DevOps’ primary goals is continuous delivery. Lean and agile software development methodologies strive to deliver value to customers continuously. Automation and integration support smaller, more focused releases, which help businesses increase velocity without compromising reliability.
Lean and agile development teams share ideas, work together to deliver solutions, and continuously improve products and processes. DevOps’ commitment to cross-functional collaboration throughout the product lifecycle makes it a natural fit for Lean and agile teams.
Jira Software’s Open DevOps supports agile teams focused on shipping and operating high-quality software with out-of-the-box Open DevOps features.
Differences between SRE vs. DevOps
SRE manages the stability of the tools, methods, and processes businesses use during the product life cycle. It ensures that teams build new products and features with sustainable tools and use processes that deliver optimal success in production.
DevOps manages the end-to-end product lifecycle from development to deployment and maintenance. It is the essence of the “you build it, you run it” approach.
DevOps handles what teams build in companies with both SRE and DevOps teams, while SRE handles how teams build it. Here is a detailed comparison of SRE vs. DevOps:
Focus
SRE focuses on the stability of the tools and features in production. It seeks to maintain low failure rates and high reliability for end users. This includes system scalability and robustness.
DevOps focuses on using a collaborative approach for building tools and features. It strives to identify and implement the best ideas by including the development and operations teams.
Responsibilities
SRE’s primary responsibility is system reliability. Regardless of the features deployed to production, SRE ensures they don't cause infrastructure issues, security risks, or increased failure rates.
DevOps is responsible for building the features necessary to meet customer needs. Unlike older approaches, DevOps increases its efficiency through collaboration across the development and operations teams.
Objectives
SRE strives for robust and reliable systems that allow customers to perform their jobs without disruption.
DevOps aims to deliver customer value through streamlining the product development lifecycle and accelerating the rate of product releases.
Team structure
SRE teams are often highly specialized with a much narrower focus than DevOps teams. SRE may include security specialists whose primary concern is protecting business data and complying with regulations.
DevOps, however, integrates and collaborates across development and operations to collect and implement the best possible solutions. With more varied input, teams can identify and solve problems before they reach production.
Process flow
SRE views the production environment as a highly-available service. Its processes focus on increasing reliability and decreasing failures. This could include security threats and failures from newly deployed features and integrations.
DevOps operates like an Agile development team. It designs processes for continuous integration and faster delivery. This includes breaking large projects into smaller chunks of work and generating and prioritizing ideas based on customer value.
Similarities between SRE vs. DevOps
SRE and DevOps are more alike than different. Both approaches arose from a desire to enhance the customer experience while building an efficient IT ecosystem. They both focus on automation, team collaboration, and a holistic approach to the software development and delivery process.
Both SRE and DevOps measure their success using similar metrics, such as the failure rate of newly deployed features. Creating a robust, bug-free system requires examining weaknesses and prioritizing continuous improvement to address them.
How do SRE and DevOps work together?
SRE and DevOps are not mutually exclusive. They complement each other in their shared aim to deliver quality software faster and more reliably. Businesses with sophisticated software and infrastructure leverage the strengths of both teams for optimal performance.
While SRE focuses on operations more than development, its team members often possess a hybrid developer/system admin set of skills. This allows them to move fluidly between development and operations as needed. They speak the language of both developers and administrators and bring a cohesive approach to developing highly scalable, resilient, and dependable products.
In Lean and agile development, SRE and DevOps use feedback data from the production environment, often collaboratively, to design improved products and systems.
SRE provides essential support to DevOps teams. It allows them to remain focused on user needs. SRE and DevOps can create efficient, automated deployment processes that reduce business costs and improve productivity.
Embrace Open DevOps for continuous delivery
Manual product delivery requires handing off code through a linear process from development, through various phases of testing, infrastructure, and release, before eventually reaching operations. This process can be slow and prone to errors. The wait time often frustrates customers.
Continuous delivery allows teams to automate the delivery pipeline. With continuous delivery, developers commit code to a source code repository where staging, testing, and production pipelines are managed through standardized processes. This results in faster delivery times and more reliable products.
Understanding how SRE and DevOps teams function, both together and separately, can help businesses leverage them for improved productivity.
Jira Software’s Open DevOps helps teams focus on continuous delivery with ready-to-use DevOps features and DevOps monitoring. Its open-tool approach supports automation and integration for the DevOps principle of “you build it, you run it.”
SRE vs. DevOps: Frequently asked questions
What problems does SRE solve?
SRE helps businesses maximize system reliability, increase scalability, and efficiently manage incidents and response times. SRE doesn’t focus on what to build. It focuses on how to build and deploy products while maintaining system availability and user productivity.
What problems does DevOps solve?
DevOps brings a collaborative, inclusive approach to end-to-end software development and operations. It eliminates silos so teams can communicate more effectively and produce the best results throughout the product development lifecycle. DevOps tools replace slow and manual processes with automation and continuous delivery, which includes ongoing feedback.
How do SRE and DevOps help teams collaborate?
DevOps's collaborative culture helps teams deliver the best possible solutions to the customer faster and more frequently. SRE’s focus on ensuring reliability and scalability is essential in defining how teams build and deploy tools and features. Together, SRE and DevOps improve cross-functional communication and collaboration.
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