Why a Site Reliability Engineer Is Important to Your CI/CD Pipeline Posted on : May 20 - 2022

Written from firsthand SRE experience, this article touches on the importance of SREs and some of the key benefits of their involvement in the CI/CD pipeline.

Continuous integration and continuous deployment are the two major components of DevOps principles. Every organization that wants to move away from the traditional way of working has to learn, design, and implement a mature CI/CD pipeline. Having a mature CI/CD pipeline is a good start for site reliability engineering, but alone, it’s not enough. The site reliability engineering (SRE) methodology brings a new perspective to the software development life cycle by aiming to achieve reliability at scale.

Drawing on my own experience of being an SRE for more than five years, I will touch on some of the key benefits I've experienced and why it's important for SREs to be involved in the CI/CD pipeline.

SRE Engineer vs. DevOps Engineer Approach Toward CI/CD

Although DevOps and the SRE approach have many things in common, they are still two different approaches that were created for different purposes. SRE was created after DevOps, when it became apparent that the DevOps way of working could not tackle all issues and satisfy all requirements. That’s why we can see these different approaches toward the CI/CD pipeline, where the most important activities of the SDLC happen. I had a chance to work as both a DevOps engineer and an SRE engineer, and here are some differences that I observed: View More