The purpose of this short blog/ write-up is to highlight the growing importance of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and why any IT professional should care about it.
As consumers of goods and services, we have always looked at ‘Reliability’ of goods or services we buy. Be it the situation of choosing of an electronic consumer good for your use, airline you want to fly with or in current times, a digital experience like hailing a cab for your local travel need. Over repeated use of product or service this reliability factor translates to ‘Trust’ in our mind and we tend to drop using such products and services that are not trustworthy.
For business enterprises offering digital services such as ecommerce, virtual meeting services, grocery delivery, travel assistance and so on, the ‘Customer Experience’ becomes the key driver of reliability. As most of us are present in cyberspace, reliability is an expectation of digital platforms. Hence making digital service reliable is the subject of SRE and hence its importance. The IT infrastructure today is a complex set-up connected components like computers, data store, software, applications and the Internet. Any one weak link could cause reliability challenges. Also, software products & platforms are not architected, designed, developed and deployed by one team.
In the traditional software and services model these different teams had different goals and they rarely collaborated. With modern approach like SRE, every team member understands the contribution of the other members and collaborate to produce unique customer experiences. Thus, SRE is expertise and culture combined for effective delivery of reliable digital experience.
With digital platforms promising latest features updated possibly several times within a day, operations team is finding ways to reduce toil, understand product vision, participate in software development and automate many operational tasks. In the same way, the development teams are reciprocating by understanding deployment & operations challenges, reliability monitoring and acting on collaborating on service levels.
SRE provides new opportunities for experienced, architects, developers, Ops professionals and software testing professionals to learn each other’s skills and collectively own customer experience. Thus, the new breed of SRE professional will become visible and credible in business enterprises. Explore more and get started soon.
About the Author:
R Nagendra Prasad
- Currently the Founder and Chief Practice Officer of Confluence Consulting Circle with over 35 years of IT industry experience n domains like curriculum design, faculty leadership development, Industry-Academia relationships, Business Intelligence & Analytics education & consulting, Product Management education & Consulting as well as Management and leadership roles in IT industry.
