DevOps and SRE

Viktor Farcic: Let's explore how the Google SRE thing relates to DevOps then. How do you define an SRE?

Nirmal Mehta: A site reliability engineer is an IT operations engineer who supports development teams and production systems based on Google DevOps methodologies.

One of the big things to come out of the SRE philosophies is that there's a risk associated with the budget of how many hours the SRE team gives their project team for fixing whatever happens.

You can deploy as risky a piece of software as you want, but if you burn through that budget, that's on you. If you're providing a service that isn't as critical, you have a higher budget, and so you can take more risk. Or you could say, "You know what, I need to save that up for certain times of the year, or certain events, and balance that out."

This approach in Google's DevOps methodology removes the ability to skirt around the pain because it puts the pain at the...