Why Does Your Startup Need A Site Reliability Engineer?
Your startup is thriving and is at crossroads where it is not feasible to operate with just a team of multitasking engineers. It is high time you start focusing on specializing in the development of scalable and trustworthy software systems for your infrastructure. A site reliability engineer (SRE), plays a pivotal role in such a scenario.
SRE incorporates critical elements of software engineering and uses them to resolve infrastructure and operations-associated issues. With this broader perspective, let us see in detail why you need an SRE for your startup.
Builds Reliable Systems
In a startup, the developments happen at a fast pace. Concurrently, system failures also escalate very rapidly. An SRE can help create reliable systems to balance these developments and break things along the process. They prioritize the tasks and understand how to deal with the system design with a single source of failure. They are highly competent to write codes that match production results with the organization’s expectations.
Monitor the Metrics
A well-qualified SRE will strive to increase the organization’s metrics. They are data-driven with excellent analytical skills. For instance, if the requirement is to replace the JAVA process to mitigate the GC issue, an SRE will first analyze the GC timing graph, to determine the optimum solution. An SRE will monitor the infrastructure and application metrics to improve the company’s efficiency.
Support Product Engineering
The SREs are also software engineers capable of providing valuable support in the product development of your startup. These SREs can interact with the engineering team to identify any significant design flaws and pertaining mitigation steps. They can go an extra mile by sharing suggestions to improve the reliability and scalability of the product, through automation.
Debug
Typically, an SRE can debug complex codes. They focus on evaluation, testing, and then deriving on the solution. They have experience in debugging theoretical issues and also assess possible cost-effective solutions to prevent a problem from occurring.
Alert Critical Customer Impacting Issues
An ideal site reliability engineer will raise the alarm for any concerns affecting the customers, well before any customer raises a ticket. They understand that critical issues vary with every infrastructure. Accordingly, SREs maintain a specific approach for the alerting system by listing the items to be monitored and optimizing the on-call rotation processes.
Understand the Scalability of Solutions
The SREs primarily deal with infrastructure segments like GCE, AWS, MySQL, and Redis, to name a few. They are well aware of the scalability of each solution. These engineers are competent enough to suggest the technologies that can support your stack and which ones to avoid. They can diligently suggest suitable pre-existing solutions, thus reducing development time.
Identify Security Threats
Some SREs have good knowledge in the security domain. Though it is not mandatory for all SREs, yet it can be considered as a value-added for your startup. A proficient site reliability engineer with a security background can identify critical security issues of your product.
Your startup is continuously evolving. It needs a resource like an SRE, who not only solves the persisting infrastructural issues of today but also foresees future concerns and the respective solutions, to yield the best results.