The vitality of the SRE domain

As discussed previously, the software engineering field is going through a number of disruptions and transformations to cope with the growth being achieved in hardware engineering. There are agile, aspect, agent, composition, service-oriented, polyglot, and adaptive programming styles. At the time of writing this book, building reactive and cognitive applications by leveraging competent development frameworks is being stepped up. On the infrastructure side, we have powerful cloud environments as the one-stop IT solution for hosting and running business workloads. Still, there are a number of crucial challenges in achieving the much-wanted cloud operations with less intervention, interpretation, and involvement from human administrators. Already, there are several tasks getting automated via breakthrough algorithms and tools. Still, there are gaps to be filled with technologically powerful solutions. These well-known and widely used tasks include dynamic and automated capacity planning and management, cloud infrastructure provisioning and resource allocation, software deployment and configuration, patching, infrastructure and software monitoring, measurement and management, and so on. Furthermore, these days, software packages are being frequently updated, patched, and released to a production environment to meet emerging and evolving demands of clients, customers, and consumers. Also, the number of application components (microservices) is growing rapidly. In short, the true IT agility has to be ensured through a whole bunch of automated tools. The operational team with the undivided support of SREs has to envision and safeguard highly optimized and organized IT infrastructures to successfully and sagaciously host and run next-generation software applications. Precisely speaking, the brewing challenge is to automate and orchestrate cloud operations. The cloud has to be self-servicing, self-configuring, self-healing, self-diagnosing, self-defending, and self-governing to be autonomic clouds. 

The new and emerging SRE domain is being prescribed as the viable way forward. A new breed of software engineers, who have a special liking of system engineering, are being touted as the best fit to be categorized as SREs. These specially skilled engineers are going to train software developers and system administrators to astutely realize highly competent and dependable software solutions, scripts, and automated tools to speedily setup and sustain highly dependable, dynamic, responsive, and programmable IT infrastructures. An SRE team literally cares about anything that makes complex software systems work in production in a risk-free and continuous manner. In short, a site reliability engineer is a hybrid software and system engineer. Due to the ubiquity and usability of cloud centers for meeting the world's IT needs, the word site represents cloud environments.

Site Reliability Engineers usually care about infrastructure orchestration, automated software deployment, proper monitoring and alerting, scalability and capacity estimation, release procedures, disaster preparedness, fail-over and fail-back capabilities, performance engineering and enhancement (PE2), garbage collector tuning, release automation, capacity uplifts, and so on. They will usually also take an interest in good test coverage. SREs are software engineers who specialize in reliability. SREs are expected to apply the proven and promising principles of computer science and engineering to the design and development of enterprise-class, modular, web-scale, and software applications. 

The importance of SREs 

An SRE is responsible for ensuring the systems availability, performance-monitoring, and incident response of the cloud IT platforms and services. SREs must make sure that all software applications entering production environments fully comply with a set of important requirements, such as diagrams, network topology illustrations, service dependency details, monitoring and logging plans, backups, and so on. A software application may fully comply with all of the functional requirements, but there are other sources for disruption and interruption. There may be hardware degradation, networking problems, high usage of resources, or slow responses from applications, and services could happen at any time. SREs always need to be extremely sensitive and responsive. The SREs effectiveness may be measured as a function of mean time to recover (MTTR) and mean time to failure (MTTF). In other words, the availability of system functions in the midst of failures and faults has to be guaranteed. Similarly, when the system load varies sharply, the system has to have the inherent potential to do scale up and out.

Software developers typically develop the business functionality of the application and do the necessary unit tests for the functionality they created from scratch or composed out of different, distributed, and decentralized services. But they don't always focus on creating and incorporating the code for achieving scalability, availability, reliability, and so on. System administrators, on the other hand, do everything to design, build, and maintain an organization's IT infrastructure (computing, storage, networking, and security). System administrators do try to achieve these QoS attributes through infrastructure sizing and by provisioning additional infrastructural modules (bare metal (BM) servers, virtual machines (VM) servers, and containers) to authoritatively tackle any sudden rush of users and bigger payloads. As described previously, the central goal of DevOps is to build a healthy and working relationship between the operations and the development teams. Any gaps and other friction between developers and operators ought to be identified and eliminated at the earliest by SREs so as to run any application on any machine or cluster without many twists and tweaks. The most critical challenges are how to ensure NFRs/QoS attributes.

SREs solve a very basic yet important problem that administrators and DevOps professionals do not. The infrastructures resiliency and elasticity to safeguard application scalability and reliability has to be ensured. The business continuity and productivity through minute monitoring of business applications and IT services along with other delights for customers, has to be guaranteed.  The meeting of the identified NFRs through infrastructure optimization alone is neither viable nor sustainable. NFRs have to be rather realized by skillfully etching in all the relevant code snippets and segments in the application source code itself. In short, the source code for any application has to be made aware of and is capable of easily absorbing the capacity and capability of the underlying infrastructure. That is, we are destined toward the era of infrastructure-aware applications, and, on the other side, we are heading toward application-aware infrastructures.

This is where SREs pitch in. These specially empowered professionals, with all the education, experience, and expertise, are to assist both developers and system administrators to develop, deploy, and deliver highly reliable software systems via software-defined cloud environments. SREs spend half of their time with developers and the other half with operation team to ensure much-needed reliability. SREs set clear and mathematically modeled service-level agreements (SLAs) that set thresholds for the stability and reliability of software applications.

SREs have many skills:

• They have a deep knowledge of complex software systems
• They are experts in data structures
• They are excellent at designing and analyzing computer algorithms

• They have a broad understanding of emerging technologies, tools, and techniques
• They are passionate when it comes to coding, debugging, and problem-solving
• They have strong analytical skills and intuition
• They learn quickly from mistakes and eliminate them in the subsequent assignments
• They are team players, willing to share the knowledge they have gained and gathered
• They like the adrenaline rush of fast-paced work
• They are good at reading technical books, blogs, and publications
• They produce and publish technology papers, patents, and best practices

Furthermore, SREs learn and position themselves to be a single point of contact (SPOC) in the following areas:

• They have a good understanding of code design, analysis, debugging, and optimization.
• They have a wide understanding about various IT systems, ranging from applications to appliances (servers, storage, network components (switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and so on)).
• They are competent in emerging technologies:
  • Software-defined clouds for highly optimized and organized IT infrastructures
  • Data analytics for extracting actionable insights in time.
  • IoT for people-centric application design and delivery
  • Containerization-sponsored DevOps
  • FaaS for simplified IT operations
  • Enterprise mobility
  • Blockchain for IoT data and device security
  • AI (machine and deep-learning algorithms) for predictive and prescriptive insights
  • Cognitive computing for realizing smarter applications
  • Digital twin for performance increment, failure detection, product productivity, and resilient infrastructures

• Conversant with a variety of automated tools
• Familiar with reliability engineering concept
• Well-versed with the key terms and buzzwords such as scalability, availability, maneuverability, extensibility, and dependability
• Good at IT systems operations, application performance management, cyber security attacks and solution approaches
• Insights-driven IT operations, administration, maintenance, and enhancement

Toolsets that SREs typically use

In the case of SREs, ensuring the stability and the highest uptime of software applications are the top priorities. However, they should have the ability to take the responsibility and code their own way out of hazards, hurdles, and hitches. They cannot add to the to-do lists of the development teams. SREs are typically software engineers with a passion for system, network, storage, and security administration. They have to have the unique strength of development and operations, and they are highly comfortable with a bevy of script languages, automation tools, and other software solutions to speedily automate the various aspects of IT operations, monitoring, and management, especially application performance management, IT infrastructure orchestration, automation, and optimization. Though automation is the key competency of SREs, SREs ought to educate themselves and gain experience to gain expertise in the following technologies and tools:

• Object-oriented, functional, and script languages 
• Digital technologies (cloud, mobility, IoT, data analytics, and security)
• Server, storage, network, and security technologies 
• System, database, middleware, and platform administration
• Compartmentalization (virtualization and containerization) paradigms, DevOps tools
• The MSA pattern
• Design, integration, performance, scalability, and resiliency patterns
• Cluster, grid, utility, and cloud computing models
• Troubleshooting software and hardware systems
• Dynamic capacity planning, task and resource scheduling, workload optimization, VM and container placement, distributed computing, and serverless computing

• AI-enabled operational, performance, security, and log analytics platforms
• Cloud orchestration, governance, and brokerage tools
• Automated software testing and deployment models
• OpenStack and other cloud infrastructure management platforms
• Data center optimization and transformation