Will SREs Make the ITOps Engineer Obsolete?

Nearly a decade ago, back when DevOps remained relatively novel, certain corners of the internet predicted that it would "kill" developers by making their jobs too ambiguous. (That never came to pass, although some folks still believe it could.)

Today, you could make a similar argument about site reliability engineers, or SREs, "killing" IT operations engineers. SREs assume many of the same responsibilities as ITOps engineers, although they also extend their work beyond conventional ITOps.

Does this mean that IT operations teams will be slowly replaced by SREs, or that ITOps roles will become so blurred and ambiguous that IT engineers will no longer recognize themselves? Let's discuss by examining the impact of SREs on ITOps.

What Do SREs Do?

The main responsibility of SREs is to ensure the reliability of IT applications and infrastructure. Reliability means that systems meet availability and performance requirements.

In doing this work, SREs handle many of the same tasks as IT operations engineers, such as:

Related:How ITOps and Site Reliability Engineer Roles Differ

SREs vs. ITOps

If those types of tasks sound very similar to the work performed by ITOps engineers, it's because they are. Provisioning environments, deploying applications and managing performance are among the core responsibilities of IT operations teams.

This means that there is significant overlap between site reliability engineering and ITOps — in much the same way that there is overlap between DevOps and software development. Hence the possibility that SREs could "kill" IT operations engineers by making them redundant.

Pushing ITOps Beyond ITOps

Not only that, but SREs also have the potential to set a standard by which IT operations teams are expected to do much more than conventional IT operations.

That's because the role of SREs extends beyond IT operations. In addition to performing the IT operations work described above, SREs also collaborate with developers to optimize application reliability during the development process. They also tend to place a stronger emphasis on code-based automation of the reliability management process than ITOps teams (which traditionally have relied more heavily on manual workflows and tools that can't be automated using code) would typically do.

In this sense, SREs could create pressure for ITOps engineers to embrace tasks that fall outside of the traditional ITOps role — lest IT managers or C-suite types decide that the ITOps team is redundant, and less valuable, for companies that also have SREs.

ITOps Engineers, Don't Panic

If you're reading this as an ITOps engineer and are now worried about your professional future, there's no need to panic yet. While it's possible that SREs could increasingly become replacements for ITOps teams, that's hardly a foregone conclusion.

One important point in ITOps teams' favor is that IT engineers are significantly cheaper to hire than SREs, who are among the top-paid types of engineer. From a financial standpoint, it's hard to imagine businesses replacing their IT teams wholesale with SREs.

A second important factor is that, even though SREs and IT engineers may do many of the same things in practice, they have different priorities. For SREs, optimizing reliability is the first and foremost goal. IT engineers may care about reliability, but they also care about things like cost-effectiveness, process consistency, and tooling flexibility — values that are secondary for SREs unless they relate to reliability.

In this respect, it's difficult to envision businesses abandoning ITOps engineers, who bring a more holistic outlook to IT management than do reliability-obsessed SREs. (To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that it's at all a bad thing for SREs to focus exclusively on reliability. That's their core mission, and it's a valuable one. But I don't think you can manage IT environments alone if reliability is the only thing you think about and SREs are the only people managing them.)

There's also the fact that the rush to hire SREs remains relatively new and could turn out to be only a fad. Although the SRE role dates back to the early 2000s, when Google introduced it, it has only been over the past few years that non-FAANG companies have begun hiring SREs. There's a chance that the SRE hype will slow down, and that 10 years from now SRE will turn out to be an elite role that only large, hyperscale companies invest in. Everyone else will rely on their IT operations teams alone.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I doubt that SREs will ever kill the ITOps role. We're likely to see some businesses experiment with reducing the size of their ITOps teams, or pushing their IT engineers to do work that extends beyond their conventional roles. But IT operations is too well-established, and too distinct from reliability engineering, to be overtaken by SREs entirely.