SRE vs DevOps is one of the most discussed topics in the IT world these days. Like DevOps, SRE or Sitereliabilityengineering also combines development and operation teams and helps them see the other side of the process. This also introduces visibility to the complete application lifecycle. Both the terms advocate automation and monitoring. Additionally, with a similar goal, they reduce the time during the fresh or change deployment to production without compromising the code’s quality.

No doubt, it is challenging to differentiate these two disciplines. As per Google’s statement also, SRE and DevOps are not so different from one another: “they’re not two competing methods for software development and operations, but rather close friends designed to break down organizational barriers to deliver better software faster.” 

Then why do we need to differentiate it as SRE vs DevOps? Let’s analyze!

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Understanding DevOps and SRE – the first step

To understand SRE vs DevOps context let’s first analyze basics of SRE and DevOps.

DevOps – This process combines the development and operation processes to make the process as a whole a seamless operation. 

5 DevOps pillars

• Reduce organizational silos
• Accept failure as normal
• Implement gradual changes
• Leverage tooling and automation
• Measure everything

SRE – It is a role that site reliability engineers perform to achieve reliability. It is a combination of admin operations and engineering processes following those two individual streams’ best practices. It expands the theoretical methods to an efficient workflow. This includes the right work methods, tools, and so on. Also, it shares the responsibility between team members to get everyone in sync towards a unique goal.

5 SRE pillars

• Embracing Risk
• Service Level Objectives
• Eliminating Toil
• Monitoring
• Automation

So, by definition, SRE vs DevOps are not two competing terms. Instead, it is the best of the solutions to achieve the goal of software development. However, technically, there are some differences. If DevOps talks about what needs to be done, then SRE describes how we can do that. 

SRE vs DevOps – the Differences

We can discuss SRE vs DevOps from the below points of views:

Job roles: SRE team helps the operation team, and both work together to make things smooth. Site reliability engineers create a stable production environment along with participation in development work. As a result, it improves the quality of coding as well as automation testing. So, SRE is more about the job role.

On the contrary, the DevOps process mainly works in an agile framework. It enables developers to write code without a complete understanding of its production mode of operation. In this process, both the development and operational teamwork deliver the product in a more agile and reliable way. It makes things more automated. Also, developers become more focused and align towards functional and compliance principles related to the operations. So, DevOps is more about the process.

Mode of management : SRE and DevOps both manage the operations of an organization’s production. However, their operational modes have stark differences. For example, DevOps finds problems and send them to the development team for solutions. On the contrary, the SRE team finds and solves such issues themselves. 

DevOps team solves problems in a way so that the production environment remains untouched. On the contrary, SREs usually accept rapid changes and software updates. However, they maintain a stable production environment.

DevOps is more about pre-production and SRE a post-production activity: DevOps empowers developers to build and manage services with the prioritization of tasks along with proper matrices. In contrast, SRE monitors applications and services after the deployment. Also, SRE enables automation to improve the overall operational performance of the process.

Now we will see how DevOps and SRE are different considering their 5 pillars of work:

Pillar 1 : 

DevOps: Reduce organizational silos 

This is an essential part of this process. This means reducing the number of teams. This effectively eliminates the communication gaps and expedite the delivery process.

SRE is not focused on silos. Instead, it focuses on how to get things done jointly by the team implementing the same tools and methods.

Pillar 2: 

DevOps: Accept failure as normal

DevOps embraces failure as a normal part of the project and believes it helps the team learn and grow.

SRE: Embracing Risk – SRE uses the formula to minimalize the error and failure in the project. They use Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for formulating possible shortcomings.

Pillar 3:

DevOps: Implement gradual changes

Today’s customer looks for faster changes. DevOps assures that but in a continuous way. But that does not ensure cost reduction or an errorless process.

SRE: Service Level Objectives – SRE provides the solution more quantitatively and reliably. This means it addresses the risk in advance, which is a cost-effective measure too.

Pillar 4:

DevOps: Leverage tooling and automation

The main focus of DevOps is as much automation as possible. Different tools and techniques are used for this purpose.

SRE: Eliminating Toil – SRE also follows the path of automation. However, it has a limit. They allow a fixed maximum amount of time on a toil.

Pillar 5:

DevOps: Measure everything

DevOps is data-driven, which measures every single aspect of your infrastructure, processes, and pipelines. It is more fact-based and does not depend on opinion. However, the term measuring everything refers to both internal and customer-facing services.

SRE: Monitoring – The two approaches to SRE monitoring are SLI and SLO. Thus, SRE follows prescriptive ways for measuring toil, availability, uptime, etc.

Final thoughts

To conclude, DevOps and SRE teams are not entirely different. Both share similar responsibilities while focusing on enabling reliability and automation. They help to combine developer and operation teams for better team performance. However, it’s all about your project goal, success, and reliability that determine whether you should go for DevOps or SRE.