Starting with the question, “What happens when you ask software engineers to design an operations team?” results in the answer, “SRE teams are responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning of their services.” If SRE is a narrower implementation of larger DevOps principles, then the primary distinction is SRE’s core focus is on reliability.
Using the above question and answer as a line in the sand, this year’s SRE 2020 report highlights an objective which may be common among relevant practitioners, regardless of their title: designing observable systems to prevent service disruptions instead of reacting to them. It starts with a clearly-identified convergence point and works backward so big or small organizations alike can evaluate against this 2020 baseline.
If a common objective is to solve complex problems, then what does that journey look like? In a microservices world, driven by edge computing efforts, the journey involves more components than before, and these components now need to be re-evaluated in a work from home reality. This includes surfacing areas which may have been ignored or nonexistent. Consider things like morale, employee experience, and human wellness to go along with traditional asset classes like organization structure, tool stack, and hardware and software.