Site Reliability Engineering — or SRE — is a software engineering approach to IT operations. SRE teams use software, automation and data to manage systems, solve problems and keep services running reliably at scale. Furthermore, SRE certification is increasingly valued by Australian employers who need IT professionals capable of maintaining large-scale service availability.
Where did Site Reliability Engineering come from?
Google created the SRE discipline in the early 2000s to manage its own infrastructure at scale. The core idea was simple — apply software engineering principles to operations problems. As a result, instead of relying on manual processes and reactive firefighting, SRE teams build automated systems that prevent problems before they occur.
What does a Site Reliability Engineer do?
A Site Reliability Engineer bridges the gap between software development and IT operations. Specifically, they manage deployment pipelines, automate infrastructure, monitor system performance and work to reduce the time it takes to detect and resolve incidents. In addition, SREs define and track Service Level Objectives — known as SLOs — to ensure services meet reliability targets.
What are the key SRE concepts?
Site Reliability Engineering builds around several core concepts:
- Service Level Objectives (SLOs) — targets for how reliable a service should be
- Error budgets — the acceptable amount of downtime or errors within a given period
- Toil reduction — automating repetitive manual work to free up engineers for higher value tasks
- Blameless postmortems — reviewing incidents without blame to learn and improve
- Observability — monitoring systems deeply enough to understand what is happening and why
How does SRE relate to DevOps?
SRE and DevOps share many principles — both emphasise automation, collaboration and continuous improvement. Moreover, SRE can be thought of as a specific implementation of DevOps principles applied to large-scale infrastructure and service reliability. Many organisations adopt both approaches together.
Who should study Site Reliability Engineering?
SRE certification suits IT professionals working in large-scale service environments including DevOps practitioners, software engineers, IT architects, operations analysts and IT managers. Therefore, anyone responsible for the reliability, performance and availability of IT systems will benefit from this qualification.
How do I get SRE certified in Australia?
Ellumina offers PeopleCert Site Reliability Engineer fully online and self-paced. It sits within the PeopleCert DevOps certification family alongside DevOps Engineer and DevSecOps. All exams are delivered through PeopleCert from anywhere in Australia.