Is the role of an SRE team becoming overloaded with other responsibilities?
Fundamentally, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) helps keep systems reliable. SRE paves the way for developers and operations teams to strike a balance between releasing new features and ensuring they are reliable for users. Here, the system refers to the umbrella term for the infrastructure, the platform, and the whole development environment on which the application runs. At the same time, reliability reflects the stability of the system.
However, the clash of the SRE responsibilities with a company’s expectations could lead to difficulties creating a stir of contention between the ideas of the industry experts and the SRE team. Therefore, the wise move here would be to accurately analyse the critical situation and spot areas of errors that can be patched up with some essential pointers and suggestions.
The emergence of Site Reliability Engineering
Traditionally, development and operations teams performed their functions in silos without meaningful collaboration. Development teams would quickly bring about application changes and pass the code to operations teams. In contrast, operations teams focus on keeping applications stable.
A new methodology, DevOps, emerged to break the wall between the two teams. It attempted to compel developers to share responsibility for systems in production and take ownership of their code. Indisputably, DevOps helped break down silos and improve software quality alongside expediting application development. However, there was no dedicated role to focus entirely on keeping systems reliable. Thus, the necessity for SRE engineers emerged as a separate role.
The SRE model stands on the two foundational components of standardisation and automation. Hence, site reliability engineers must find ways to enhance and automate operations tasks.
SRE teams taking on responsibilities of other teams
The need for SRE teams arose to ease the strife between development teams aimed to develop new products/features and operations teams that ensured the service was reliable to end-users. Most outages occur after a software patch, new feature, or configuration update.
Back in the day, the role of an SRE was perceived according to the concept initially put forward by Google to introduce different automation techniques to increase production efficiency. The deciphered definition of the Site Reliability Engineering process can be explained as the system that treats operational functions with an automated software engineering approach. This fancy and innovative mindset was employed to lure many unicorns into the business successfully.
Over time, SRE teams have started taking on the responsibilities of other groups. Instead of assigning the work that SRE teams stand for doing, companies also make them do different functions. We witness a tug of war between what SRE teams need to work on and what companies ask them to do. For instance, many companies push infrastructure and product support work onto their SRE team.
Increasingly, we have also seen, over the years, that many SRE teams are just operations or infrastructure teams instead of separate teams. By all accounts, it is the failure of leadership that does not prioritise building sustainable systems and writing quality software. The leadership wants the constant flow of code quickly to draw the maximum number of clients.
SRE teams taking on errors of other teams
Exploiting SRE professionals’ diverse duties has deliberately created a window for all the other departments to blame the site reliability and engineering team.
Whether anything goes wrong in the design phase or a sudden bad deployment issue pops up, SREs are always the first victims to take the heat for everything. The funny part is that even the most efficiently celebrated companies like Google are also in the same havoc as others.
It signals an utter failure if an SRE team diverts from its primary task and gets busy dealing with alerts while other groups do not provide accountability. Then, hell breaks loose because of constant avoidance of ensuring the reliability of systems, and guess what? The company finds itself in deep trouble with very little chance of recovering from the mess.
Closing remarks
The role of Site Reliability Engineering is key to the continuous improvement of people, processes, and technology. It is worth noting that SRE and DevOps are partners, and not competitors, that work side by side to break silos, streamline operations, and deliver quality software.
With an open and clever mind, alternate strategies may help solve SRE-related challenges. For instance, representatives should realise why the organisation is recruiting an SRE member and what target they want to achieve with the help of an SRE team. Also, the organisation should establish a consistent allocation of SRE authority to avoid operational and software engineering role conflicts.
