While looking at DevOps vs. SRE, it is critical to note that both of these practices are developed over time to address one thing, which is to produce efficient and highly scalable applications. Over the last few years, the adoption of both DevOps and SRE has grown significantly. Gartner reports that, by 2027, 75% of companies will put SRE principles to use, whereas DevOps will grow by 22.9% every year.
Even if the objective for both development functionalities remains non-conflicting, there are certain key differences between the two. Keep reading this article further to clarify the critical differences between DevOps vs. SRE.
We will touch upon the following concepts throughout this blog:
Watch this video to learn more on SRE vs DevOps in detail!
What is SRE?
Do you know that while working at Google, Benjamin Treynori, a Software Developer introduced Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in 2003, which started to influence the traditional way of developing software? That’s when SRE became a reality.
In the past, operations teams used to carry out these activities manually. Site reliability engineering is a software engineering approach that helps to automate IT infrastructure tasks and assigns the responsibilities to software engineers or operations teams, who use appropriate technology and automation to manage production and fix problems.
SREs are responsible for large-scale software systems’ scalability, reliability, and performance to keep them available and responsive for any upcoming tasks.
Here’s an SRE Documentation to know critical responsibilities and know-how about site reliability engineers.
What is DevOps?
To bring people, processes, and technology together for application design, development, delivery, and operations, DevOps merges development (Dev) and operations (Ops). Together with quality engineering, security, IT operations, and development, the responsibilities that were under different names can now be coordinated and collaborated on, all thanks to DevOps.
DevOps is best defined as people working together to rapidly create, build, and deliver secure software. DevOps teams are responsible for faster delivery, which can be done through automation, collaboration, on-time feedback, and continuous improvement.
As we are familiar with SRE and DevOps, we need to know the roles of an SRE and DevOps engineer.
Site Reliability Engineer vs. DevOps Engineer
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps Engineers are both crucial roles in modern software development and operations, but they have very distinct focuses and responsibilities. Here are the elaborations below:
| SRE | DevOps |
| SRE focuses on making sure software runs smoothly and quickly. They handle tasks like fixing code, setting up automatic processes, and monitoring systems to ensure everything works well. | DevOps engineers often use DevOps tools and processes to simplify software development and testing tasks. They are also responsible for smoother deployment processes and help increase efficiency by cutting down on manual tasks. |
| SREs, or Site Reliability Engineers, are proactive in their approach to improving how their teams operate. By constantly seeking enhancements, SREs help ensure that their teams can deliver reliable and high-quality services to users. | They promote teamwork among different teams, like development and operations to ensure better communication during software development. |
| They maintain documentation of their findings, ensuring consistent knowledge sharing among team members for unified workflows and problem-solving approaches. | They manage Cloud infrastructure by setting up and adjusting resources to support trouble-free and continuous software delivery and deployment. They keep an eye on the process and make sure that everything is working accordingly. |
Now let’s look at the objectives and the use cases of both SRE and DevOps engineers.
Objective
The goal of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is to minimize delay and maximize performance by implementing proactive measures and automation to ensure system availability and reliability. DevOps, on the other hand, emphasizes collaboration and automation between development and operations teams to speed up software delivery, streamline processes, and improve deployment dependability.
Use Cases
An SRE designs scalable systems that monitor performance and automate incident response. They ensure high availability, keeping applications reliable and resilient. DevOps automated deployments facilitate communication and integrate continuous delivery pipelines. They help speed up software releases with fewer errors.
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SRE vs. DevOps: Job Descriptions
Summarizing, the major roles and responsibilities/skills that a SRE professional requires are:
- To check system reliability and availability through proper monitoring and troubleshooting
- To automate infrastructure management to scale and optimize systems efficiently
- Collaborate with development teams to improve application performance and stability
- Implement and maintain security measures to protect systems and data
- Continuously improve processes and technologies to enhance system reliability and efficiency
Let’s look at some top job descriptions for the SRE profile:
Source: LinkedIn Job Description for SRE
Source: LinkedIn Job Description for SRE
Summarizing, the major roles and responsibilities/skills that a DevOps Engineer requires are:
- Practice development and deployment for faster, more reliable release
- Implement and maintain automated pipelines for CI/CD pipelines
- Work with development, operations, and other teams for seamless software delivery and operation
- Monitor and optimize systems for peak performance, scalability, and reliability
- Implement and maintain IaC practices for efficient and consistent infrastructure management
Let’s look at some top job descriptions for the DevOps engineer profile:
Source: LinkedIn Job Description for DevOps Engineer
Source: LinkedIn Job Description for DevOps Engineer
Based on the data provided above, we now have a general understanding of the main responsibilities that SRE and DevOps have on hand.
Differences in Job Roles of SRE and DevOps
Here’s a comparison of the job roles of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps Engineers:
| Aspects | SRE | DevOps |
| Focus | SREs ensure infrastructure stability, scalability, and performance using automation, monitoring, and proactive problem-solving | DevOps practitioners emphasize streamlined communication, shared responsibility, and automation across development, operations, and security teams |
| Skillset | SREs make sure that the systems they work on are dependable, can handle growth, and also, easy to take care of | DevOps mainly focuses on connecting developers and operations teams, often taking charge of putting code into action and managing the tools needed for it |
| Tools and Technologies | SREs use tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Chef to automate infrastructure tasks. They also use monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana to keep check on system performance. When things are not in place, they use tools like PagerDuty and VictorOps to get alerts and manage scenarios | DevOps uses many different tools, like ones for managing settings, making sure code changes get delivered smoothly and automating infrastructure tasks (CI/CD). They also use tools like Git to keep track of code versions and Docker to package applications neatly |
| Metrics and Success | Success in both SRE and DevOps is measured by how well the services stay up and running, how fast they perform, how quickly they can recover from issues, and how often changes cause problems. Error budgets and service-level objectives (SLOs) are important for defining goals and keeping track of how well the systems are doing | Performance metrics for DevOps are measured by how fast the team brings out new features, how reliable the systems are, how happy users are, and how smoothly DevOps teams collaborate with each other |
| Automation | As an SRE, it’s all about automating the setup of the systems to handle complexity better so that one can fix problems quickly and increase scalability. | DevOps automates the entire software delivery lifecycle, including build, test, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning, aiming for continuous delivery and reduced manual interference. |
| Work Culture | A SRE prefers working in a place that encourages solving problems before time, being good at what they do, and making decisions based on data | DevOps grows in a culture that prioritizes collaboration, communication, and continuous improvement. Building gaps between teams and sharing ownership is essential |
| Team Structure | Often form dedicated teams responsible for specific services or infrastructure domains | Can be embedded within development teams or exist as cross-functional units, diminishing traditional development and operations boundaries |
| Incident Response Approach | Gives priority to root cause analysis (RCA) to prevent future occurrences, focusing on automation and self-healing systems | Performs rapid restoration and resolution, often using shared ownership and blameless post-mortems |
We have collectively divided the tools into three categories, common tools used by SRE and DevOps and then individual tools, which are quite popular among both the job roles.
Common Tools that are shared by both the job roles:
SRE specific tools:
- Alerting and Incident Management: PagerDuty and VictorOps
- Distributed Tracing tools: Jaeger and Zipkin
DevOps specific tools:
- Deployment Management: Spinnaker and ArgoCD
- Automated and Security Testing: Jmeter and Robot Framework
What are the Career Prospects for SRE and DevOps Engineers?
These days, both job roles are trending, on one hand, SRE uses software engineering techniques to maintain reliability, while on the other hand, DevOps uses automation tools to fill the gap between the development and operations teams of a particular organization.
As the demand for these two job roles grows, openings are filling up daily. We have collected data on the number of open openings for SRE and DevOps engineers in India and the United States.
There are around 68000+ SRE Job Vacancies in the United States. In India, the figure is comparatively less due to limited adoption. In the future, it will boom, for sure.
Looking at the DevOps opportunities in the United States, there are around 18000+ vacancies. In India, DevOps is still in the blooming phase, which will surely go up as the demand increases day by day.
Advantages of being an SRE
- Technical Expertise: SRE are primarily coders, which means they are superior when it comes to technical knowledge. Eventually, this helps them in having diverse job roles and better growth opportunities.
- Higher Salary: As they are directly involved in impacting system performance and development of a particular organization, dependencies increase a lot on them. As a result, they are paid more for their diverse knowledge and skills.
- Long-Term Opportunities: SREs were out of the limelight for quite some time, but now they are getting the attention they deserve. For the long term, SREs are the perfect choice, as they have coding as well as specialized skill sets.
Advantages of being a DevOps Engineer
- Less Coding Skills: For this particular job role, you need not be a hardcore coder, you can have basic coding skills, and you can still be a successful DevOps engineer.
- Faster Career Growth: Being a DevOps engineer at present is really a blessing, as there are multiple opportunities circulating across the globe. The diverse skill set and having a strong hold on tools, make it the most promising career in IT. Currently, there are 24000+ vacancies just on LinkedIn, imagine what the numbers will be across all the portals.
SRE vs. DevOps Engineer: Salaries
SRE Engineer Salary
Source: Glassdoor
DevOps Engineer Salary
Source: Glassdoor
Here’s the table for the salary figures for SRE and DevOps engineers in India and the US, respectively.
| Salaries | SRE (India) | SRE (US) | DevOps (India) | DevOps (US) |
| Lowest | ₹8,27,404 | $126,644 | ₹5,50,000 | $103,165 |
| Average | ₹13,92,072 | $152,749 | ₹9,00,000 | $123,531 |
| Highest | ₹21,80,286 | $186,418 | ₹14,80,000 | $149,114 |
Conclusion
As the buzzwords of IT, SRE and DevOps bring automation to make the processes efficient and fast. Both methods share common practices, yet deliver a different product methodology.
While a person working in a DevOps team has specific job responsibilities, a software engineer in the SRE team partly works as a system engineer. Both the job roles of DevOps and SRE are popular and have huge demand in the IT industry. Either of the roles can provide you with excellent career growth and ample learning opportunities.
FAQs
Does SRE require Coding?
Yes, coding skills are required as an SRE, you need to write code to automate tasks and maintain system compatibility. SREs tend to use programming languages like Python or GoLang to create scripts or applications that help in improving the performance of large-scale systems.
What's the difference between SRE and DevOps?
The main difference between an SRE and a DevOps engineer is that an SRE has to write code to track and manage system performance using various software, on the other hand, a DevOps engineer communicates between different teams to maintain an easy transition process.
How is SRE related to DevOps?
SRE can be termed a specialized implementation of DevOps principles, as SRE focuses on scalability and performance of the organization, whereas DevOps is a broader picture for SRE as they work between different development and integration teams.
Which pays more for DevOps or SRE?
The answer is SRE, as they are specialized individuals who directly contribute to the scaling of the company, which makes them highly in demand, resulting in better compensation and development rates as compared to DevOps.