SRE vs DevOps, SRE or DevOps or is it SRE & DevOps? No better person to ask than somebody that has been an SRE for much longer than our industry is talking about Site Reliability Engineering.

Michael Wildpaner, Sr Engineering Director Cloud Security at Google, started as an SRE for Google Maps back in 2006. Fast forward to 2022 Michael has a lot of hands-on experience about the SRE role, the different levels of SRE that one organization can apply and how it connects with DevOps.

Tune in and hear his personal stories from more than 15 years at Google. While not everyone is Google – there for sure is a lot we can take out of this conversation.



Here some of my personal take aways

Core idea of SRE: take engineers that understand distributed systems and “annoy” / guide developers to build better resilient systems from the start
Design for automation: this already starts with naming your infrastructure (aka – don’t use lord of the rings names)
SREs help so that you DO NOT DESIGN yourself into a corner
Observability is the foundation of good SRE as it enables incident management, insights all the way up to user insights
Tip: Ensure new hires understand that you have a blameless culture


As follow up material check out those links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-wildpaner
Talk at DevOps Fusion 2022: https://devops-fusion.com/en/speaker/michael-wildpaner/