Differences between Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps Explained

SRE makes sure systems are reliable and easy to manage. Let’s see how it works using everyday examples to bring these complex ideas to life:

1. SLOs & SLIs

• Service level objectives (SLOs) are specific goals that companies aim to meet in terms of reliability and performance. 
• Service level indicators (SLIs), on the other hand, are the metrics used to measure whether these goals are being achieved.

Imagine your favorite online store promising that its website will load within 3 seconds at least 98% of the time. 

• Here, the 3-second load time is the SLO
• The percentage of times it actually loads within 3 seconds is the SLI.

2. Blameless Postmortems

Blameless postmortems are meetings where teams discuss what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future, focusing on improvement rather than fault. 

That being said, when things go wrong, SRE emphasizes learning from the incident without blaming any individual. 

Example: If a website crashes during a sale, the SRE team would investigate the cause and discuss how to better handle traffic spikes without pointing fingers at any team members.

3. Automation vs. Toil

SRE automates repetitive, manual tasks (known as toil) to free up time for more valuable work that improves the system. 

If an engineer spends hours every week manually checking server logs for errors, automating this process with a script can save time and reduce the chance of human error.

For more in-depth information about the added advantages of SRE, give this a read. 

Here comes the main segment. We’ll explore the key differences between SRE and DevOps and how these two practices compare and complement each other.

Tools and Techniques

Both SRE and DevOps rely on specialized tools to execute their tasks effectively. 

Starting with SRE tools, businesses can leverage various monitoring, automation, and incident management tools that proactively monitor and manage complex cloud infrastructures. This ensures high system availability and performance across multiple cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

SquareOps & SRE Tools

At SquareOps, we help businesses set up and maintain reliable, scalable, and high-performance systems using some of the best SRE tools out there. Our goal is to make sure your infrastructure runs smoothly, no matter how complex it gets.

• Monitoring and Observability – Prometheus & Grafana

We use Prometheus and Grafana to provide powerful monitoring and observability for our clients. This combination offers a real-time view of your system’s health.

We also integrate Atmosly, a platform designed with a security-first approach, into your development pipeline. It helps identify vulnerabilities early, allowing for quick remediation improving the overall security posture of your applications. On top of that, Atmostly seamlessly connects with observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack, enabling more efficient management and optimization of your cloud infrastructure.

• Incident Management – PagerDuty

When things go wrong, you need the right tools to jump into action. That’s why we use PagerDuty for incident management. 

This tool helps us set up automated alerts and escalation paths to ensure the right people are notified as soon as something happens. We’ve used PagerDuty to reduce downtime for clients, keeping operations running smoothly even during critical incidents.

• Cloud Platforms – AWS 

At SquareOps, we leverage AWS to manage and scale cloud infrastructure for our clients. We ensure that your cloud environment is secure, scalable, and cost-effective—whether you’re running microservices, containers, or serverless applications. 

Being an AWS advanced consulting partner, we help businesses migrate to AWS with minimal friction.

AWS Partner Competencies

SquareOps has earned AWS Competency recognition in specialized areas like DevOps and cloud operations, optimizing our client’s AWS infrastructure. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, we’ve got the expertise to set up a robust, efficient system for you.

Next, let’s explore some of the popular DevOps tools.

DevOps Tools

SquareOps applications are built, tested, and deployed using a combination of popular tools. This allows for efficient and repeatable deployments across environments. 

• CI/CD Pipelines – Jenkins

At SquareOps, we help set up a simple and efficient CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins for hundreds of microservices running in Kubernetes on AWS EKS. 

Our approach is designed to be developer-friendly, straightforward, and easy to maintain. Plus, it’s been proven effective in large-scale production deployments. 

Want to see how it’s done? Check out our step-by-step guide for the entire setup here.

• IaC Tools – Terraform

With our Terraform IaC services, SquareOps streamlines and automates cloud infrastructure management. We develop reusable and modular Terraform configurations, supporting multi-cloud environments. 

Our team implements best practices for Terraform state management, including remote state storage, state locking, and encryption, to maintain the integrity and security of your infrastructure state.

Here’s a real-time example. 

SquareOps: A Comprehensive Terraform IaC Service Partner 

Tompkins Robotics, a leading logistics and warehouse management provider in the U.S., partnered with SquareOps to migrate their applications to a containerized environment using AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). 

We utilized Terraform to automate the provisioning of AWS infrastructure and EKS clusters. This resulted in improved scalability, reduced deployment times, and enhanced operational efficiency.

As discussed above, both SRE and DevOps benefit from automation and collaboration tools. Let’s now examine how these two practices complement each other.

A Quick Comparison: SRE Vs. DevOps

While both aim to improve software delivery and system reliability, SRE and DevOps approach these goals from different angles.

Here’s how:

Let’s wrap up by summarizing how they can work together to ultimately boost your business growth. 

Why Choose SquareOps?