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People view SRE in many difference ways. If you were to go through the Google SRE book, there's nothing explicit in there about building "platform" or doing an
by halbritt 6y ago
People view SRE in many difference ways. If you were to go through the Google SRE book, there's nothing explicit in there about building "platform" or doing any infrastructure engineering.
It's is a given that SRE build tooling, but most of the SRE-focused work, as described in that book is around improving the resilience of a given application or product. Addressing production readiness, defining SLOs, and handling incident response.
There are platform specific SRE teams at Google, but there's not much published about how they get about creating platform.
The book "Seeking SRE" makes it clear that in most places, the notion of "platform engineering" varies tremendously.
I don't know of any authors that have addressed this explicitly other than Susan Fowler in "Production Ready Microservices" who writes:
Another important part of microservice adoption is the
creation of a microservice ecosystem. Typically (or, at
least, hopefully), a company running a large monolithic
application will have a dedicated infrastructure
organization that is responsible for designing, building,
and maintaining the infrastructure that the application runs
on. When a monolith is split into microservices, the
responsibilities of the infrastructure organization for
providing a stable platform for microservices to be
developed and run on grows drastically in importance. The
infrastructure teams must provide microservice teams with
stable infrastructure that abstracts away the majority of
the complexity of the interactions between microservices.
- SanderKnape 6y agoThe book Team Topologies discusses Platform Engineering. They consider four core team types, and the platform team is one of those. Some more information about those types can be found here: https://teamtopologies.com/key-concepts-content/what-are-the-core-team-types-in-team-topologies https://teamtopologies.com/key-concepts-content/what-are-the... I can definitely recommend this book for a (new) perspective on how platform teams fit into organizations.
- andendau 6y agoGreat book highly recommended
- dutch3000 6y agoin first paragraph of the article. “However, a number of factors are, and continue to, cause the traditional responsibilities of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to shift.” ie, SRE teams are shifting to become Platform teams or in other words are indistinguishable from them...
- jart 6y ago> People view SRE in many difference ways. If you were to go through the Google SRE book, there's nothing explicit in there about building "platform" or doing any infrastructure engineering. In a past life I worked on an SRE team that backed up data to cassette tapes using a fleet of robots with lasers. https://youtu.be/kQ2taAttvwo https://youtu.be/kQ2taAttvwo That was easy. Hard SRE work is more like Traffic Team. My personal view is that microservices, libraries, frameworks, apis, abis, etc. have a great deal in common today with how we've always thought about internet routers. Ask yourself this: if JavaScript web apps could run traceroute, then how many stakeholders do you think would show up before your query even reaches the wire? So I think what the author Nick is saying makes perfect sense. Yes, these platform layers can cause difficulties. Can we fix them? Yes, just read the SRE book. That same wisdom will carry over just fine to this kind of problem.