IT Operations has a wide spectrum of roles and responsibilities. The positions range from level 1 (L1) operators to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and everything in between. L1 operators, for example, are (often) almost exclusively reactive. They feed off the constant stream of incidents reported by clients and events that are reported by monitoring and alerting systems. This is in contrast to SREs, who work at the other end of the spectrum.
An overview of how SREs can benefit from Infrastructure-as-Code.
In the world of a site reliability engineer (SRE), failure is not only an option, but also expected. Systems, web applications, servers, devices, etc., are all prone to performance issues and unexpected outages at some point. It is an unavoidable fact. These unexpected failures can lead to huge revenue losses, customer trust and depending on the industry, maybe fines. Fortunately, SRE incident management is one of the core practices used to limit the disruption caused by unexpected issues.
Although every company can benefit from SREs, some need SREs more than others.
This blog post defines SRE by explaining SLOs and error budgets, highlighting the innovation vs. reliability tradeoff.