Digital transformation efforts have become more like digital transformation mandates in the tech world ever since the COVID-19 pandemic made working from home the new normal. This has meant a rapid change in the B2B software landscape (although when has that not been the case?) as vendors rise to meet buyer demand for collaborative, hybrid technologies.
As a result, certain roles suited to remote collaboration and cross-system knowledge have come to the forefront. In the world of DevOps, site reliability engineers (SREs) in particular have become increasingly sought after as important additions to agile DevOps teams.
So what exactly is the role of an SRE, and how will the rapidly evolving software they use continue to support their efforts to lead the charge for competitive DevOps strategies?
SREs embody the silo-breaking spirit of DevOps through knowledgeable leadership of both development and operations teams. Where DevOps brings these teams and functions together as an agile philosophy and process, SREs possess the cross-team skills necessary to build a single persona.
SREs aren’t IT avatars juggling every development and operations task as they stride through an impossibly productive day to day. They instead, typically serve as systems architects curating a code-first software infrastructure within which DevOps teams can thrive. Their cross-functional knowledge offers support and perspective to team members on each side of the DevOps coin—software engineers and IT professionals—to enable them to do their best work.
Given their role in curating highly collaborative, agile architecture and supporting the teams that work within it, it follows that the relatively new SRE persona will only continue to grow, now that many companies have shifted to a remote work environment. As a result, certain types of software might see growth.
To help get started with an SRE or SRE team currently, certain categories of software can be of use. The right software is key to optimally achieving service-level objectives by uniting disparate roles, monitoring progress on objectives, and leveraging automation.
Monitoring tools like application performance monitoring (APM) software, cloud infrastructure monitoring software, and the larger umbrella enterprise monitoring software allow SRE teams to keep constant watch over all of their IT systems. These tools are crucial in bringing disparate information under a single pane of glass, thus centralizing observability efforts to gain insight into the state of a company’s systems.
According to G2 data, traffic to the Enterprise Monitoring Software category has seen a 160% increase since the pandemic caused global lockdowns in March 2020 through the end of 2020. This activity signals that an increasing number of companies seek out and rely on these observability solutions to maintain constant insight into all aspects of their IT infrastructure, especially in an all-remote work environment. Such oversight is in conjunction with the goals of successful SREs—to successfully architect and maintain infrastructure that can be managed under one dashboard.
Other important tools in the SRE utility belt include configuration management software, which ensures that infrastructure configurations are in a known and well-documented state while also automating the process of returning to the desired state when necessary. Cloud infrastructure automation software helps SREs implement an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach by allowing developers to create a templated infrastructure to run their application code and review code, and integrate it. These templates then serve as the blueprints that can be generated automatically, streamlining the process.
The tools that SREs currently use are in hot demand as remote companies have adjusted to increasingly cloud-based infrastructure. As this new landscape takes shape, other software will inevitably enter the fold as both SREs and the tools themselves evolve.
I’m going to put my (definitely stylish) speculation hat on for this part. I believe that, as companies grow comfortable with remote operations and seek to remain competitive in the future, low-code development platforms will come to the forefront of many companies’ SRE efforts. This is not to say that these solutions are not already popular but they’re also poised to take over as the de facto development environments for many companies.
The term “low-code” has been buzzing for a while and G2’s software development trends in 2021 predict that these platforms will soon become heavy lifters for both enterprise application development and business process management (BPM) on a large scale.
As low-code development platforms become a central hub for both full-stack developers and operations teams, it’s highly likely that they will become a core part of successful SRE adoption. They already check many of the SRE boxes: unite disparate roles, leverage automation, and bring together multiple business functions under a single dashboard.
| Read more: Low-Code Development Platforms: Understanding Personas Amid Popularity Surge → |
While I do love being right, it’s anyone’s guess as to how site reliability engineering will continue to evolve as a role within companies looking to modernize their DevOps efforts. The remote work landscape has seen SREs and the software supporting them become increasingly popular, and that trend should only continue as we carry on with 2021.
Companies looking to stay competitive as they double down on remote infrastructure should keep a close eye on the DevOps software space and organize an effective SRE strategy if they haven’t already (incidentally, G2 can help with that). It will be interesting to see how software solutions evolve to support SREs more directly.
This post is part of G2's 2022 digital trends series. Read more about G2’s perspective on...
by Adam Crivello
It’s been over six months since G2 published its 2021 digital trends series. That means more...
by Adam Crivello
This post is part of G2's 2021 digital trends series. Read more about G2’s perspective on...
by Adam Crivello