In this guide, I will walk you through the distinctions among DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Platform Engineering.
As the software systems to be worked on get bigger, the teams will have to deliver faster and still be able to maintain the system’s stability. Each of the DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering will have its unique way of solving this issue.
DevOps
DevOps can be considered as a culture and a collection of methods that are directed to improving the compatibility between the development and operations teams.
It puts a major emphasis on automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, and monitoring as it helps the teams to ship software faster and more reliably.
👉 DevOps is all about speed and teamwork.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
SRE entails the application of software engineering principles to operations with a strong focus on reliability.
SRE, through activities such as monitoring, incident management, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets to keep the systems stable, allowing the teams to work fast.
👉 SRE is concerned with reliability and system stability.
Platform Engineering
Platform Engineering is about the creation of internal platforms that make the developer’s job of building, deploying, and operating software easier.
Continuous self-service tools and the provision of standardized infrastructure by the platform teams lead to the reduction of complexity and the simultaneous improvement of developer experience at scale.
👉 Platform Engineering mainly targets developer experience and scalability.
Differences at the Core
The main difference between the three approaches is that each one of them has its own priority.
DevOps is concerned with the removal of barriers and speeding up the delivery process through cooperation and automation.
SRE does the opposite by securing production through the specification and enforcement of reliability targets.
Platform Engineering goes the long road of building reusable platforms that give the teams the onward march of speed without the headache of infrastructure management.
To put it simply:
DevOps is the one that inquires, “How can we give out the product faster?”
SRE is the one that inquires, “What is the level of reliability of the system?”
Platform Engineering is the one that inquires, “How friendly is this for developers?”
Conclusion
DevOps provides the benefit of speed.
SRE maintains the drawback of being able to produce only stable versions.
Platform Engineering overlays both processes with the proper infrastructure.
They are the best when they are collaborating and not when they are working separately. The real benefit comes from understanding when and how to use each approach as your systems and teams grow.