Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • LIZ FONG-JONES: Hi there.

  • I'm Liz, a Site Reliability Engineer, or SRE, at Google.

  • And I teach Google Cloud customers

  • how to build and operate reliable services.

  • SETH VARGO: And I'm Seth, a Developer

  • Advocate at Google focused on infrastructure and operations.

  • And Liz and I are here to settle things once and for all.

  • Which is better, DevOps or SRE?

  • LIZ FONG-JONES: Whoa there, Seth.

  • Hold on a second.

  • I'm not sure you're really looking

  • at this in the right way.

  • But first of all, maybe we should clarify some things.

  • What do you think DevOps is?

  • SETH VARGO: So that's a great question, Liz.

  • Back in the day, operators and developers

  • had a lot of contention.

  • Developers used to throw their code

  • over the metaphorical wall, and operators

  • were responsible for keeping that code running

  • in production.

  • Operators had little understanding of the code

  • bases, and developers had little understanding

  • of operational practices.

  • But developers were concerned with shipping code,

  • and operators were concerned with reliability.

  • This misalignment often caused tension

  • within the organization.

  • LIZ FONG-JONES: So if I understand you correctly,

  • you're saying that the developers were

  • responsible for features, and the operators

  • were responsible for stability, meaning the developers wanted

  • to move faster to get their features out faster

  • and the operators wanted to move slower to keep things stable?

  • I could see how that would cause a lot of tension.

  • SETH VARGO: Exactly.

  • So DevOps is a set of practices and a culture designed

  • to break down those barriers between developers, operators,

  • and other parts of the organization.

  • I break DevOps down into five key areas.

  • First, reduce organizational silence.

  • By breaking down barriers across teams,

  • we can increase collaboration and thorough put.

  • Second, accept failure as normal.

  • Computers are inherently unreliable,

  • so we can't expect perfection.

  • And when we introduce humans into the system,

  • we get even more imperfection.

  • Third, implement gradual change.

  • Not only are small, incremental changes easier to review,

  • but in the event that a gradual change does

  • make a bug in production, it allows

  • us to reduce our mean time to recover,

  • making it simple to roll back.

  • Fourth, we need to leverage tooling and automation.

  • And fifth, we need to measure everything.

  • Measurement is a critical gauge for success.

  • And without a way to measure if our first four pillars

  • were successful, we would have no way of knowing if they were.

  • So, Liz, you've been an SRE at Google for over 10 years now.

  • Do you think any of the way that I described DevOps aligns

  • with your experience as an SRE?

  • LIZ FONG-JONES: It's sounding very familiar.

  • Because, if you think about DevOps as a philosophy,

  • SRE is a prescriptive way of accomplishing that philosophy.

  • So if DevOps were an interface in programming language,

  • you might almost say that SRE is a concrete class that

  • implements DevOps.

  • Let's take a look at how that is.

  • So, Seth, when you talked about eliminating

  • organizational silos, what I thought about

  • is the fact that we share ownership of production

  • with our developers.

  • And we use the same tooling in order

  • to make sure everyone has the same view and same approach

  • to working with production.

  • When you talked about accepting accidents and failure

  • as normal, what I thought about is the fact that--

  • similar to many DevOps practitioners--

  • we have blameless postmortems, where

  • we make sure that the failures that happen in our production

  • systems don't happen the exact same way more than once.

  • And we accept the failures as normal by encoding

  • a concept of an error budget of how much the system is allowed

  • to go out of spec.

  • And then third, we talked about making gradual changes.

  • And when you said that, I thought about the fact

  • that we canary things, that we roll

  • things out to a small percentage of the fleet

  • before we move them out for all users.

  • And then fourth, when you talked about leveraging

  • tooling and automation, what I thought about

  • is the fact that we try to eliminate manual work

  • as much as possible.

  • So we measure how much toil we have,

  • and then we try to automate this year's job away.

  • And then fifth, when you talked about measuring everything,

  • I thought about exactly that measurement

  • of measuring the amount of toil that we have

  • and measuring the reliability and health of our systems.

  • SETH VARGO: I really like that.

  • Class SRE implements DevOps.

  • We should get that on a shirt or something.

  • But just like a class in a programming language,

  • there might be additional functions or methods

  • that don't necessarily correspond to that interface.

  • Or the class might implement multiple interfaces.

  • Do you think SRE is like that?

  • LIZ FONG-JONES: I absolutely think

  • that's the case because of the fact

  • that SRE doesn't do things in the exact same way

  • that other people that implement DevOps elsewhere

  • might want to do.

  • So we'll talk a little bit more about those differences,

  • such as how exactly SLOs work, which

  • are a very specific concept that we implement in order

  • to make SRE successful.

  • SETH VARGO: Great.

  • Well, that settles it, then.

  • It turns out that DevOps and SRE aren't two competing methods,

  • but rather close friends designed

  • to help break down organizational barriers

  • to deliver better software faster.

  • Thank you, everyone, for watching.

  • Please be sure to check the description

  • below for more links, and don't forget

  • to subscribe to our channel.

  • Stay tuned for our next video, where

  • we will discuss the differences between SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.

LIZ FONG-JONES: Hi there.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it