DevOps focus on eliminating the organizational silos that impede collaboration between development and operations functions, whereas SRE works to design and implement the kind of scalable, dependable systems that ensure maximum reliability.
This blog post delves into the differences between DevOps and SREs, their roles and responsibilities, the problems they solve, and the tools they use.
What we will cover:
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to IT operations with the goal of creating highly scalable and reliable systems. Originally developed by Google, SRE bridges the gap between development and operations teams by using a software-focused approach to solve operational challenges.
Key principles of SRE
- Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) – SLOs define the performance expectations for a service, like uptime or response time, and serve as a benchmark for reliability. These objectives help balance the delivery of new features and maintain system stability.
- Embrace risk – SRE embraces the idea that 100% reliability is not feasible. By using an “error budget”—the amount of allowable downtime—teams can manage risk and ensure a balance between innovation and reliability.
- Eliminate toil – Toil refers to repetitive, manual work that doesn’t contribute to system growth. SRE aims to minimize toil through automation, freeing engineers to focus on more impactful and innovative tasks.
- Automation – Automation is a core principle in SRE. It reduces human intervention in repetitive tasks, ensuring that systems can scale efficiently and reducing errors caused by manual operations.
- Blameless postmortems – After any incident, blameless postmortems are conducted to learn from failures without attributing personal blame. This encourages a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and cultural philosophies that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT operations. Its primary goal is to shorten the development lifecycle, improve collaboration between teams, and ensure continuous delivery of high-quality software.
Key principles of DevOps
- Collaboration and communication – DevOps promotes a culture of open communication and collaboration between development, operations, and other teams throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Automation – Automating repetitive tasks, such as testing, integration, and deployment, speeds up software delivery and reduces human errors, making processes more efficient and reliable.
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) – CI/CD pipelines enable frequent integration of code changes, automated testing, and rapid deployment, allowing for faster and more frequent updates while maintaining high quality.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Treating infrastructure through code allows for automated, scalable, and consistent infrastructure management. IaC ensures environments are reproducible, reducing errors and deployment inconsistencies.
- Continuous monitoring and feedback – Continuous monitoring of systems and applications helps teams detect issues early and improve performance and reliability through ongoing feedback loops.
While DevOps is all about the what aspect of things, SRE talks about the how part of things. Nevertheless, there are a few other key differences between the two.
- Implementing new features — DevOps is responsible for implementing the new features requested for a product, whereas SREs ensure those new changes don’t increase the overall failure rates in production.
- Process flow — A DevOps team uses its perspective of the development environment to make changes from development to production. On the other hand, SREs use their perspective of production to suggest ways to limit failure rates despite the new changes to the development team.
- Objectives — While both aim to improve operational efficiency, SRE emphasizes maintaining service uptime through proactive monitoring and incident response, heavily relying on automation. DevOps seeks to enhance collaboration between development and operations teams to streamline software delivery and improve the overall development lifecycle.
- Focus – DevOps’s primary focus is on continuity and speed of product development, whereas SRE’s main focus is on the system’s reliability, scalability, and availability.
- Team structure — A typical DevOps team consists of professionals with dedicated roles and responsibilities, such as Product Owner, Team Lead, Cloud Architect, Software Developer, QA Engineer, Release Manager, and System Administrator. In contrast, SREs have a team of engineers with operational and development skills.
Difference in job roles of SRE and DevOps
Although there is some overlap in the job roles of SREs and DevOps, there is a wide segregation of functions:
| DevOps | SREs | |
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Role
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The main role of the DevOps team is to solve development problems and build solutions that meet business requirements.
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SREs’ main role is to deal with operational problems, such as production failures, infrastructure issues (disk, memory), security, and monitoring.
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| Focus
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Focus on product development with Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery.
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More focus on resilience, scaling, reliability, uptime, and robustness.
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| Tools
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In the DevOps engineer role, the most widely used tools are – Integrated Development Environment (IDEs) for development purposes, Jenkins for Continuous Integration and Development, JIRA for change management, Splunk for log monitoring, SVN, and GitHub.
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In the SRE role, the most widely used tools are Prometheus and Grafana for collecting and visualizing different metrics (CPU usage, memory, disk space, etc.), incident alert tools (OP5, PageDuty, xMatters, etc.), Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, Kubernetes and Docker for container orchestration, and cloud platforms AWS, GCP, Azure, JIRA, SVN, and GitHub.
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| Bug reporting
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The DevOps team is responsible for debugging the code in case any bug is reported in the end product.
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The SRE team reports bugs to the Core development team and does not get involved in debugging unless it is a production outage. The SRE team is also responsible for debugging and fixing infrastructure issues.
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| Measurement metrics
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Typical measurement metrics for the DevOps role are Deployment Frequency and the Deployment Failure rate.
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Typical measurement metrics for the SRE role are Error Budgets, SLOs (Service Level Objectives), SLIs (Service Level Indicators), and SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
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| Incident handling
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DevOps teams work on the incident feedback to mitigate the issue. | Conducts post-incident reviews to identify the root cause and document the findings, providing feedback to the core development team. |
| Skills
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A strong foundation in software development, system administration, and automation tools, with expertise in CI/CD pipelines, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash), version control (Git), infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible), and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana). | Strong technical skills in areas such as system administration, networking, cloud infrastructure, automation, and monitoring tools.
Key proficiencies include expertise in coding (Python, Go, or Bash), managing large-scale distributed systems, implementing CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring high availability, scalability, and service performance through effective incident management and root cause analysis. |
SRE vs. DevOps – comparing salaries
Both SRE and DevOps professionals are in high demand, with competitive salaries driven by factors such as expertise, certifications, and regional job market trends. In the United States, SREs tend to earn slightly more due to their critical role in ensuring system reliability and performance. On average, SRE salaries range from $120,000 to $150,000 annually. Meanwhile, DevOps engineers generally earn between $110,000 and $140,000 per year, although seasoned experts in either field can earn significantly more, depending on experience and specialization.
SRE and DevOps share the goal of improving software development and operations by contributing to a more resilient and agile IT infrastructure. Both focus on automation, continuous monitoring, and optimizing system performance to reduce downtime and operational issues. They encourage a culture of shared responsibility, where development and operations teams work together to deliver software more quickly and reliably.
Implementing the DevOps practices can reduce the friction between Development and Operations teams. It can also help you deliver the end product reliably, along with other challenges and problems that the DevOps teams can solve.
1. Reduced cost of development and maintenance
A DevOps team always works towards CI/CD, putting more effort into automated testing rather than manual testing and improving release management by automating it all.
In the traditional Software Development Life Cycle, there is always toil on the effort (development, testing, release), which increases the overall cost of product development and production maintenance. Executing DevOps can significantly reduce delivery time, development, and maintenance costs.
2. Shorter release cycle
One of the most effective changes a DevOps team makes is to deliver faster with a shorter release cycle. The DevOps team advocates a shorter release cycle because it is easy to manage and roll back to the stable version in case there are any issues.
Unlike traditional release cycles, which focus on getting everything delivered in one release, DevOps practices are strictly followed. This increases the risk of failure in production and makes it much harder to roll back. The organization will always have a proper release version system with release versions and minimal manual interventions with the release artifacts.
Here are the gains of a shorter release cycle:
- Deliver the new change request more frequently;
- Pushing the upgrades (bug fixes, security patches, version upgrades) to production is much easier.
3. Automated and continuous testing
In contrast to the traditional development cycle, where the testing team has to wait for the delivery of the product in the test environment to begin the testing DevOps, testing is injected from the beginning of the development lifecycle.
DevOps facilitates continuous and automated testing with the help of the CI/CD tool (Jenkins) and version control (Git, BitBucket). Adequate coverage of functional, nonfunctional, and interaction tests running in the pipelines can significantly improve the testing automation aspects of the project.
To learn more about DevOps, see our article on Who is DevOps?
Here are some of the key problems that SRE teams solve:
1. Reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR)
The SRE team is responsible for keeping the production up and running. In the event of a bug or production failure, SRE teams can roll back to the previous stable version of a product so that the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is reduced.
2. Reduced mean time to detect (MTTD)
The other problem that the SRE team is trying to solve is to reduce the Mean Time to Detect(MTTD) using the Canary Rollouts so that the new release is made available to a small group of users before doing full rollouts. Canary rollouts help the SRE team find the issues in the early stage with a limited number of affected users.
3. Automated everything
Automation is one of the biggest challenges the SRE team faces. Rollouts and supporting tasks are often carried out manually, leading to inconsistency and increasing the probability of human error.
A good practice for managing the infrastructure is to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with the help of Terraform, Pulumi, and the automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef. SRE team can leverage those tools to solve the problem of automation.
4. Automated functional and non-functional testing in production
The Core Development team can automate functional and non-functional testing in the test and stage environments but not in production.
Reliability engineers can help implement automation testing on Production environments without affecting the end-user.
5. On-Calls and incident documentation
Often reliability engineers have to take the on-call duties for managing unforeseen incidents, but they also have to prepare the documentation of the incidents and the troubleshooting steps so that it can help others perform the on-call duties.
The SRE team can build up a valuable knowledge base on incidents to improve the incident troubleshooting time.
6. Shared knowledge
Gaining exposure and building the knowledge base of the product development ecosystem (dev, test, stage, prod) is always beneficial for reliability engineers who can foresee issues in the production environment.
But the main problem arises when the knowledge base is outdated and automation playbooks have irrelevant comments. Regular knowledge base updates by SREs in collaboration with DevOps can fill the knowledge gap between the teams.
When we discuss the tools of DevOps and SRE, we often observe that most of them are commonly used by both DevOps and SREs.
| Tools for DevOps and SREs | |
| Planning tools |
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| Configuration management tools | |
| Version management tools |
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| Log monitoring tools |
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| Infrastructure orchestration tools |
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| SRE tools | |
| Monitoring tools |
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| Incident reporting systems |
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| DevOps tools | |
| Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools |
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| Integrated development environment tools |
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| Automated and security testing tools |
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While the two share some core values, the focus of their work is different – the application lifecycle through DevOps and operations lifecycle management through SRE. Nevertheless, they both connect the development and operation teams while sharing similar responsibilities. And they are both working towards the same goal – enhancing the release cycle and achieving better product reliability.
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