SREs: Prime Directives and Ultimate GoalsSREs: Prime Directives and Ultimate Goals

By Diana James

Site reliability engineers (SREs) serve as the "Guardians of the Grid" in the high-stakes world of site reliability engineering, ensuring critical systems remain operational and efficient. An SRE's main objective is to create scalable and reliable systems while optimizing costs. SREs work cross-functionally with software development and IT operations to maintain performant applications while proactively addressing common challenges, implementing automation, and avoiding systemwide failures. These professionals embody the dedication and expertise required to keep the digital world running smoothly.

Vasdev Gullapalli is a senior staff site reliability engineer and manager at Qualcomm, a global communications company. He has more than 14 years of experience in Agile methodologies, DevOps, and SRE engineering. Gullapalli was a featured speaker at the 2024 Gerrit User Summit, where he delved into the role of SRE in managing a business-critical application. He presented Qualcomm's Gerrit global footprint, infra management, automated deployments, future deployment strategies, monitoring, alerting, and the associated challenges.

In this Q&A, Gullapalli offers valuable insights into the prime directives, ultimate goals, and required skill sets for SREs.

Related:How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer: A Step-by-Step Guide

Q: What is site reliability engineering, and what are an engineer's primary objectives?

Gullapalli: Site reliability engineering involves the use of engineers who are responsible for ensuring applications are reliable, scalable, and perform optimally and cost-effectively. When an application goes down or runs with degraded performance, it has a direct business impact, which may be local, national, or even global, so an SRE's job is critical. An SRE's primary objective is ensuring automated, efficient, reliable, and effective system performance with real-time observability, monitoring, and alerts while remediating any issues before they become observable to the customer.

Q: Which trends are driving the evolution of managing distributed systems?

Gullapalli: Several prominent trends come into play. Containerization in software deployment and the shift toward microservices and modular system design on the architectural engineering side have significantly impacted how distributed systems are managed over the past two decades. Advances in networking technologies and the more recent artificial intelligence (AI) movement are also key factors, redefining how distributed systems are designed, operated, and evolved.

Q: How do SREs differ from developers?

Related:Site Reliability Engineering Teams Face Rising Challenges

Gullapalli: To prioritize reliability across various markets, organizations can shift more to hiring SREs instead of relying solely on their developers because the skill set for a developer is very different from an SRE's skill set. Developers know how to develop their applications with various programming languages to meet organizational needs and requirements, but they may not understand what it takes to deploy, scale, and make the application performant — these are SRE techniques. I refer to SREs as the Guardians of the Grid because we ensure applications perform effectively and efficiently through proactive monitoring, protecting systems from going down.

Q: What is the ultimate role of an SRE?

Gullapalli: SREs monitor, scale, alert, and ensure reliability, but taking it up one level is an SRE's ultimate goal. Designing an architecture that can self-diagnose issues — for example, if it is using too much memory or might crash soon — and can self-heal.

Q: What qualities and skill sets do SREs need to be successful?

Gullapalli: In the past, there were only system administrators, and then the new role of DevOps came around; combining the sysadmin role with DevOps created SREs. The engineering role is continually evolving, and it's vital for individuals in the field to keep progressing, too. Someone who was a systems administrator in the past knows the system inside and out and might make a good SRE. Still, they need to bring something new to the table with modern skills. Because Python took over the world, developing capabilities with that tool is helpful, but learning to configure advanced monitoring tools into applications makes an SRE even more valuable.

The SRE role is stressful because what we do or do not do can have catastrophic rippling effects on organizations. For example, on Black Friday, many e-commerce companies see spikes in traffic. If the database reaches its limit but a triggered alert goes unnoticed because the monitoring system doesn't have the right thresholds, the system could start slowing down, and some services may stop working. Customers can't complete their purchases, and abandoned purchases pile up. Companies might lose millions in potential revenue and take serious hits to their reputation, with angry customers flooding social media to complain. A properly configured monitoring system, scalable architecture, and quick intervention could have prevented the meltdown.

This is why SREs need to stay on top of proactive planning, build resilient systems, and manage incidents effectively. The ability to handle high-pressure situations with enthusiasm, energy, resilience, empathy, customer centricity, and strong problem-solving and communication skills are critical to being a successful SRE.

Q: What are some common challenges SREs face, and how can they mitigate them?

Gullapalli: Balancing current operations with long-term development while maintaining flexibility and scalability is essential to an SRE's success. Other challenges include managing actionable alerts and incidents, maintaining security, and automating applications, especially with emerging technologies. The key to addressing these problems is investing in continuous learning to stay on top of technological advancements, remain current with cybersecurity risks, and know what tech and metrics best fit the system. Having clearly communicated and established policies and procedures and performing root cause analysis are also essential.

Q: What do you see in the future of SRE?

Gullapalli: As technology evolves, cyberthreats will continue to be a concern, so SREs need to stay focused on security and system resilience. Additionally, with the speed of advancements in AI, the industry will develop more effective and efficient means of processing, including automation, monitoring, and optimization. Predictive analytics will be more accurate with more advanced machine learning models, scaling will be faster than ever, and we will have self-healing systems without human intervention. SREs have an exciting future ahead.

Future-proofing for Success

Site reliability engineering ensures modern distributed systems meet reliability, performance, and scalability demands, while quality SREs often prioritize setting clear service-level objectives (SLOs) to guide this process. Through proactive monitoring, innovative solutions, and collaboration across roles, these Guardians of the Grid provide lasting value to organizations. By staying up to date on technological advances, embracing emerging trends, and remaining agile and scalable, organizations can future-proof their systems for the evolving digital landscape.

About the Author:

Diana James is an author, freelance writer, and editor of non-fiction and fiction works. She writes for numerous trade publications, including those in the medical, accounting, and technology industries. Connect with Diana on LinkedIn.