SRE vs Platform Engineering

What’s the difference between SREs and Platform engineers?

While SREs are about real-world implementation of DevOps practices in Site Reliability engineering, Platform engineering is about designing the infrastructure to help developers develop and deploy software. Platform engineering has picked up steam in recent years and is the new term in town to assuage concerns around Reliability engineering. But… What does it really mean?

What is Platform Engineering?

As organizations migrate their environments to the cloud, they need experts who can bridge the gap between developers and cloud infrastructure to leverage cloud platforms.

Platform engineering is the process of creating a self-service deployment platform that developers can use to deliver new releases quickly and reliably. It enables developers to become self-reliant in dealing with software-delivery setup despite a potentially minimal knowledge of infrastructure deployment.

What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

The actual, real-world implementation of DevOps practices is Site Reliability Engineering. The DevOps movement started off in 2007 as a framework. But Google had been running these practices since 2003 in their engineering efforts and coined the term SRE. So, the actual implementations became all the more important. Site Reliability Engineers took DevOps practices and ‘productized’ them in an organization.

Platform engineering refers to the practice of designing, building, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure, tools, and services that enable software development and deployment within an organization. It focuses on creating a robust and scalable platform or foundation upon which applications and services can be developed, deployed, and operated.

Key aspects of Platform Engineering include:

1. Infrastructure Design and Management: Platform engineers design and manage the underlying infrastructure required for running software applications. This may involve working with cloud providers, configuring virtual machines, containers, networking, and storage resources. They ensure the infrastructure is scalable, secure, and reliable.
2. Automation and Tooling: Platform engineers develop and maintain automation scripts, tools, and frameworks to streamline the software development and deployment process. This includes implementing infrastructure-as-code practices, managing configuration management systems, and setting up continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
3. Platform Services: Platform engineers build and maintain shared services and frameworks that developers can leverage to accelerate their application development. These services may include logging and monitoring systems, database management systems, caching systems, service discovery, and load balancing.
4. DevOps Enablement: Platform engineers work closely with development and operations teams to enable effective collaboration and implement DevOps practices. They facilitate the integration of development and operations workflows, enable seamless deployment and monitoring of applications, and promote a culture of automation and collaboration.
5. Performance and Scalability: Platform engineers focus on optimizing the platform's performance and scalability to handle the expected workload and accommodate future growth. They analyze system metrics, conduct load testing, and make architectural improvements to ensure applications can scale and perform well under different conditions.
6. Security and Compliance: Platform engineers consider security and compliance requirements in the design and implementation of the platform. They implement access controls, encryption mechanisms, vulnerability scanning, and other security measures to protect the platform and the applications running on it.

The goal of platform engineering is to provide a stable and efficient development platform that empowers developers to focus on building applications rather than worrying about the underlying infrastructure. By creating a solid foundation and promoting standardization, platform engineering helps organizations achieve faster time-to-market, higher quality software, and improved operational efficiency.

Key responsibilities of an SRE include:

1. Reliability: SREs prioritize system reliability by monitoring, measuring, and managing service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. They establish processes to mitigate risks, manage incidents, and perform post-incident reviews to learn from failures.
2. Automation: SREs develop and maintain tools, frameworks, and infrastructure to automate operational tasks, such as deployment, configuration management, monitoring, and capacity planning. They emphasize building reliable, scalable systems through code and configuration.
3. Collaboration: SREs work closely with development teams to ensure that new software releases are reliable and production-ready. They provide guidance on system architecture, scalability, and performance, and help improve the overall development and deployment processes.

Some organizations may have dedicated SRE teams responsible for system reliability, while others may distribute SRE-related responsibilities among DevOps or development teams.

Here’s a table capturing some of the differences and similarities between the two roles: