The Systems Engineering Side of Site Reliability Engineering
Venue
;login:, vol. 40, No. 3 (2015)
Publication Year
2015
Authors
David Hixson, Betsy Beyer
BibTeX
Abstract
In order to run the company’s numerous services as efficiently and reliably as
possible, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization leverages the
expertise of two main disciplines: Software Engineering and Systems Engineering.
The roles of Software Engineer (SWE) and Systems Engineer (SE) lie at the two poles
of the SRE continuum of skills and interests. While Site Reliability Engineers tend
to be assigned to one of these two buckets, there is much overlap between the two
job roles, and the knowledge exchange between the two job roles is rather fluid.