Life Cycle Asset Management, Risk Mitigation, and Loss Elimination are crucial tasks for any business. If there is no efficient management of business assets, the business or plant operation will face adverse effects. On the other hand, if the tracking of excessive asset maintenance and production losses is not proper, the company might suffer substantial financial losses. In this post, you shall be introduced to the major roles of reliability engineers.
All the above tasks are those that belong to a Reliability Engineer. A Reliability Engineer is a professional who discovers ways to mitigate losses and eliminate high costs. He or she does this through Root Cause Analysis, Mitigation Plan Drafting, and overseeing the implementation of the Mitigation Plan.
Origin of Site Reliability Engineering
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the brainchild of Google. The organization developed and introduced this branch of Engineering in 2003, much before its DevOps movement. The rationale behind this project is to make large-scale sites efficient, scalable, and reliable.
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These development practices meshed well with the needs of the organization. Later, other big companies like Netflix and Amazon adopted this practice and even brought new insights to the table.
Later on, SRE became a stable Information Technology (IT) domain, which functions to develop automated solutions to Disaster Response, Capacity and Performance Planning, On-call Monitoring, and other aspects of Operations. SRE effectively complements other DevOps core practices like Continuous Infrastructure and Delivery Automation.
What are the Major Roles of Reliability Engineers?
Ben Traynor, Google’s Engineering VP, and Google SRE founder explained the essence of the SRE(site reliability engineer) role. He said that an SRE mainly performs the Operations teams’ work. An SRE team consists of a group of Engineers with expertise in Software and Banking. The SRE team will be undertaking the following responsibilities – Capacity Planning, Emergency Response, Monitoring, Change Management, Efficiency, Performance, Latency, and Availability.
A Reliability Engineer, therefore, builds a bridge between Operations and Development by using his Software Engineering expertise to handle System Administration issues. He uses half of his work time for developing software and systems and the rest for taking up operations duties.
The main goal of an SRE is to automate the job. And to achieve this, self-service tools must be available for user groups that use such a service. For example, tools for Statistics Visualizations, Logs, and Automatic Test Environments Provisioning have to be available for the employees who frequently use the same.
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This role efficiently reduces the work in progress for all parties, making people focus exclusively on other tasks for Automation and Feature Development.
SREs work closely with people from Product Development. Their primary objective is to make sure that design solutions can quickly respond to non-functional tasks like Maintainability, Security, Performance, and Availability. Besides, they also work in collaboration with Release Engineers to ensure that the management of the delivery pipeline for software is skilful.
The SRE Team’s Role and its Day-to-day Duties
Generally, an organization’s SRE team is responsible for various Risk-management-related tasks. And, at present, since most of the Operations teams in companies have similar roles, SRE teams have multiple responsibilities. So, SREs are usually Engineers with a solid Software Development background.
An SRE usually acts as the hub that links development teams and business stakeholders together. The SRE team works with the Development team to create and test new products, updates, features, and fixes. Then, the pairing of these products and fixes with the needs of each business stakeholder takes place. It is the SREs’ role to ensure the flawless functioning of these products and services. They are also responsible for handling the burgeoning consumer demands.
Seeking the services of a professional Site Reliability Engineer might add to your current operational expenses, but the benefits they can bring to your business are immeasurable. Undoubtedly, the advantages of hiring these professionals outweigh the costs necessary to compensate them for their services.
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