In my view it is having a dedicated team focusing their full mental bandwidth on pro-actively understanding and managing robustness of the system.<p>In Pure DevOps, it seems to me developers often don't have the full picture of the system, and not enough bandwidth to foresee complex interactions from their changes.<p>These are from my experiences spending one year as a developer in somewhat large a greenfield development project for a machine learning infrastructure based on Kubernetes, where subtle platform errors would often cascade into the applications layers, causing really hard to debug problems that often left more junior application developers scramble to even know where to start debugging.<p>I'm preparing a presentation though, and I'm eager to hear your experiences and perspectives on this!<p>(SRE = Site Reliability Engineering - https://sre.google/ )
Comprehensive knowledge of the application codebase(es) you’re responsible for and the ability to quickly determine root cause of failures and revert or remediate, either by shipping hot fixes, infrastructure changes, or both.
SRE brings a laser focus to system reliability, ensuring proactive management and a comprehensive understanding of the system's robustness.<p>In comparison, 'plain' DevOps might sometimes lack that specialized attention, potentially leaving blind spots in foreseeing complex system interactions. SRE is all about that extra layer of assurance for smoother, more resilient operations!
SRE and DevOps teams overlap a lot, with SRE being a specific implementation of DevOps, more focused on reliability and scalability by applying software engineering principles.<p>Sometimes traditional sysadmins will be labeled as DevOps because they are using some config management tool, but the practices are the same.<p>The next level is Platform Engineering, which creates a platform that encapsulates all these best practices.<p>You can have dedicated or distributed DevOps and SRE teams. You can't have distributed Platform team.
They'll all be washing dishes when the next recession hits IT and the need for affordability exceeds the need for reliability in service.<p>When the first company relearns that on-prem with dedicated admins is infinitely cheaper than cloud with similar reliability and less / cheaper staff overhead it will be a rude awakening. This is especially sad to me as most women in our field are in DevOps/SRE roles as opposed to SWE.<p>Pray that Bezos and co. can keep their customers / your employers fooled.