Describing an SRE’s main responsibilities
We hope the SRE job role mission and scope are less foggy at this point. As an SRE, what would you be responsible for? In this section, we will investigate the most trivial duties that SREs are accountable for. We’ve divided these responsibilities into two sections:
- Operational work responsibilities
- Engineering work responsibilities
Let’s start by reviewing the operational group first.
Operational work responsibilities
Site reliability engineers have work duties related to the process of managing systems. Such tasks are called operational work. SREs are not just accountable for operational work together with the operations team, but they also have the authority to execute their management processes.
First, they are responsible for the ITIL® processes, including incident, problem, and change management. That means they actively participate in on-call schedules for critical services downtime as first responders. They need to isolate the faulty components of the service, troubleshoot the causes of the component issues, repair them or provide a workaround, reestablish the affected service to nominal performance, and verify whether the service has been restored from the user’s perspective. After significant service disruptions, SREs must determine their root causes and contributing factors. They implement change requests to the systems, backing services, delivery pipelines, integrations, infrastructure, and applications.
Second, they are accountable for maintaining systems, services, applications, and infrastructure. They may need to patch a bug into production or assist the development team. SREs may have to deploy a new software version using a canary release, A/B testing, or blue-green deployment.
Third, SREs have the responsibility of taking care of the observability platform. That includes installing, configuring, maintaining, and monitoring the observability tools. Yes, we monitor the monitoring.
Engineering work responsibilities
SREs do engineering work to reach higher levels of availability, resiliency, performance, quality, and scalability on a system. They work on each configuration item or component to increase its reliability. The overall system delivers more trustable services and SLOs by handling each component reliability index.
Site reliability engineers are responsible for reliability metrics, such as the mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR). MTTD indicates how fast the monitoring system can detect a service problem or an anomaly that will lead to a problem if nothing is done. MTTR indicates how swiftly an incident is repaired after it’s detected. Those metrics make SREs accountable for the effectiveness of the observability platform and tools, and the runbooks documentation.
The mean time between failure (MTBF) is another reliability metric under SRE accountability. That indicates how much time it takes for a system failure. SREs must adopt the blameless postmortems principle to improve this metric every time a failure happens. And that translates to multiple reliability enhancements to different parts of the system as a result of these postmortems.
SREs are accountable for toil management. The less toil we have in systems management, the better the metrics mentioned previously. Site reliability engineers work tirelessly to detect and eliminate repetitive tasks devoid of business value.
We described the ordinary responsibilities of an SRE with the intent of giving you an idea of what to expect in this career. Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of duties or intended to suggest a constraint to their responsibilities. As long as they work to fulfill the guiding principles, they are doing SRE work. We are going to review which activities SREs execute daily next.
