What does a Site Reliability Engineer do?
SREs are professionals who ensure that computer systems work perfectly without failures or disruptions in most organizations where they operate. This is a hybrid role that crosses over the development-operation divide, meaning it will contribute hands-on to traditional operations team activities. The expertise of SREs is applied in introducing measures that enhance reliability, reduce downtimes, and promote efficiency in the organization’s infrastructure.
Site Reliability Engineer Job description
The site reliability engineer is a pivotal interface between development and IT ops, performing operational functions that usually fall under operations. This is crucial towards making sure that the computers within an organization are reliable operational and available.
SREs act in advance by using monitoring, automatic approaches, etc., to avoid problems. It involves being “on call” for possible problems and to stop them before they blow up.
They use their tools such as Chef, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and GitLab CI/CD, to perform their duties of running and overseeing infrastructure. These include activities such as deployment, scaling, and maintenance.
SREs develop robust monitoring facilities focusing on symptom alerting instead of the traditional wait-until-the-outage approach. Consequently, this consists of setting up notifications on different operational problems which the computers could have.
Site Reliability Engineer Job Responsibilities
- Administering production jobs
- Understanding debugging information
- Preventing Incidents
- Infrastructure Management
- Adding serving capacity
- Monitoring and Alerting
- Using monitoring systems
- Operational Problem Resolution
- Capacity Management
- Documentation
- Collaboration and Communication
Site Reliability Engineer Skills
- Operational Expertise: The ability to do operational tasks that are necessary for the
computer system integrity and availability. - Proactive Problem Avoidance: Advanced monitoring and automated systems for preventing
possible issues. - Tool Proficiency: Capable of using tools like Chef, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and
GitLab CI/CD for the execution and monitoring of infrastructure actions. - Monitoring and Alerting: Competence in ensuring strong surveillance tools with a primary
emphasis on symptom alerting to avoid breakdowns. - Collaboration and Communication: Due to their nature as a key communication channel
between development and IT ops, strong collaboration and communications skills are crucial
for SREs.
