If you're an engineer reading this, you might be wondering what I mean by the title. You might be a Site Reliability Engineer whose primary responsibility is to maintain the reliability of your company’s product/solution. You might be a software builder, a programmer responsible for building new capabilities and shipping them to production. All of these are important for any business to remain competitive.

Whether it's in classrooms or on Zoom calls, the kids have headed back to school! Bright-eyed students are gearing up to study new subjects and test their brains. Hopefully on their report cards, failure isn’t inevitable. Before the first day, parents load up their kids’ backpacks with everything they’ll need. Being well equipped with good supplies is the best way to stay focused and educate “reliably”. Likewise, SREs need the right tools and practices for the job.

At VMware, we make use of modern development and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices on a regular basis. And those of us who work on the VMware Tanzu Observability product marketing team regularly get exposure to various SRE teams that implement modern practices with the observability technology we create.

In 2016, Google released the definitive book on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) - a practice that had originated in the company to take care of a monumental problem - how to keep the Google services running with high reliability. Over the years, SRE has been widely adopted by dev teams across the globe and is a popular role at startups and enterprises alike. Here is a look at how search for SRE has trended over the years.

TL;DR: Old, deprecated code/infrastructure is a challenge that every engineer will come across. Remedy what you can and remember that some extra effort can go a long way. It can uncover issues that, when addressed, will save you in the future. Part of the challenge of software development is maintaining legacy code and infrastructure. When you ignore or neglect these, issues start to pop up and your reliability suffers, causing pain for your customers. The trick here is to actively steward each project.

SRE and DevOps are closely related concepts, and many businesses can benefit from embracing both of them. Nonetheless, there are important distinctions between SRE and DevOps.

Want to know more about the DevOps lifecycle? We explain the seven phases in DevOps, and how each one plays a vital role in the development process.

Establishing a formal SRE practice can be either a 'nice-to-have' or a 'must-have' depending on org size, and team structure among other important factors. In this blog, Ricardo Castro shares his thoughts on the key SRE principles that every organization must incorporate and when they should incorporate in their SRE journey.

A comprehensive definition of SREs and Site Reliability Engineering, including what SREs do and what makes SREs different from other roles.

Curious about the differences between DevOps vs. Agile development methodologies? We'll explore and compare both approaches. What are the key differences between DevOps vs. Agile? Agile and DevOps are methodologies that share the goal of producing software quickly. In DevOps, Development and Operations work together closely throughout the software development lifecycle process. Agile is an iterative approach that focuses on deploying releases rapidly with small teams.