Software development is growing fast, which is certainly making IT operations complex. It has led to a significant increase in the recruitment of site reliability engineers (SREs) in reputed software organizations. An SRE assimilates vital aspects of software engineering and utilizes them to mitigate infrastructure and operations related issues.
Google was the first one to propose the concept of SRE to build and implement software that improved the reliability of their support system. With the increasing number of aspiring SREs, you must be careful while identifying a highly competent reliability engineer, suitable for your organization.
Let us see what you can expect from a successful SRE.
Exceptional at Fulfilling SRE Roles and Responsibilities
A proactive SRE builds software to aid operations and support teams. They are experts at fixing support related escalations and optimizing the on-call rotations. A diligent SRE will learn from past mistakes. They create a massive knowledge from historical data, conduct root cause analysis, determine the appropriate solution, and document the findings.
Pursues Every Opportunity to Automate
An outstanding SRE will successfully increase the reliability of the infrastructure without curbing the company’s capability to deliver software quickly. It is feasible, as an SRE will determine all possible opportunities for automation. Brilliant SREs are proactive in finding automation-based solutions to mitigate stressful manual deliveries, bugs, and so forth.
Enhances Competency with New Tools and Processes
An SRE role is quite challenging in terms of tasks assigned. For instance, an ops practitioner may have to perform tasks that need them to learn a programming language.
An accomplished SRE will aim at becoming an expert in cross-team competency. They regularly update their skills with the latest developments in tools and operational processes. The best SREs are open to this kind of learning and skills development.
Inclined to be Pragmatic
An intelligent SRE will have a pragmatic approach to any suggested solution, understanding its effect on the business and the entire organization stack. The best SREs will be forward-thinking in terms of foreseeing the consequences of implementing the solution.
Focuses on Solutions
A pragmatic SRE will be solution-oriented. They do not have second thoughts while dumping processes and procedures that are not effectively productive. There could be scenarios where an SRE might have done extensive brainstorming to come up with a solution for a particular infrastructural issue.
However, it might as well happen that the idea cannot be automated, slowing down the deliveries, down the stack. The best SREs will immediately scrap out the process and start analyzing other possible solutions to resolve the issue.
Capable of Persuading Organization to Do the Right Thing
A confident reliability engineer will be able to convince the organization about specific SRE initiatives or particular automation solutions. They are always ready with the details required to justify the proposal. Such SREs are confident in putting forth excellent solutions that help in achieving long term goals of the organization.
To summarize, you can expect a successful SRE to move out of their comfort zone. They are open to developing new skill sets to achieve consistent, reliable systems for the organization. In this way, the IT and development teams can focus more on building new features and services.