SRE vs DevOps

The experts who coined both these terms describe SRE and DevOps as — “Class SRE implements DevOps”.

A few key objectives for a DevOps would be to

• Reduce organization silos
• Accept failures as normal
• Implement smaller incremental changes to a system
• Leverage tooling and automation
• Measure everything

SRE would also look at these same objectives but the perspective differs, it would be more user-centric and revolve around service level objectives (SLOs).

“Reduce organization silos” — SRE would strive to make sure that everyone has the same view and approach to working on the system given any environment -dev, stage or prod.

“Accept failures as normal” — SRE takes blameless postmortems very seriously. Errors are normal, but keep a tight check on them with the help of assigned error budgets.

“Implement smaller incremental changes to a system” — With larger updates to the system comes the risk of multiple failures. Alternatively, smaller incremental updates make testing and mitigating the failures a lot easier. SRE will advocate smaller and incremental changes too!

“Leverage tooling and automation” — SRE measures the toil, and busts them with automation and tooling.

“Measure everything” — Measuring different parameters of the system is critical. SRE uses pretty much the same monitoring tools as DevOps to deduce SLOs, SLIs and error budgets.