While SREs are hotshots in the industry, their role in a microservices environment is not just a natural fit that goes hand-in-hand, like peanut butter and jelly. Instead, while SREs and microservices evolved in parallel inside the world’s software companies, the former actually makes life far more difficult for the latter.
That’s because SREs live and die by their full stack view of the entire system they are maintaining and optimizing. The role combines the skills of a developer with those of an admin, producing an employee capable of debugging applications in production environments when things go completely sideways.
As Google engineers essentially invented the role, the company offers a great deal of insight into how they manage systems that handle up to 100 billion requests a day. They boil down reliability into an essential element, every bit as desirable as velocity and innovation.
“The initial step is taking seriously that reliability and manageability are important. People I talk to are spending a lot of time thinking about features and velocity, but they don’t spend time thinking about reliability as a feature,” said Todd Underwood, an SRE director at Google.
Read more at The New Stack
