DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE: What’s (Really) the Difference?

Garron Kramer Senior DevOps Engineer @ GlobalDots
7 Min read

DevOps is an enterprise software development phrase used to describe an agile relationship between development and IT management. Changing and improving the relationship between these two business units is the goal of DevOps, which advocates better communication and collaboration. It is estimated that the DevOps (Development to Operations) market will grow at a CAGR during the period 2020-2026, from US$6 Billion in 2020 to US$17.8 Billion in 2026. DevOps market development strategy pre-and-post COVID-19 is a comprehensive look at the global development to operations (DevOps) industry, providing information on market dynamics, growth factors, major challenges, and PEST analysis and market entry strategy for the leading 20 countries in the industry.

Software companies rapidly adopt DevOps, a development and operations strategy that breaks down barriers and enable collaboration across teams. The process makes sense for most companies, except when it doesn’t. When an issue has been resolved in production, no one should need to revert to the old way of doing things, but that’s what happens when security is broken.

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Developers and system administrators aren’t always in agreement about many issues, and both sides can agree that their clients often push them in different directions. However, on the other hand, business users want to see as much change as possible—new features, new services, and new revenue streams. At the same time, they need a system that is reliable and unaffected by failures or disruptions of any kind. The result is that companies feel they must choose between delivering changes quickly and dealing with an unstable production environment or maintaining a stable but stagnant environment.

It’s no surprise that business leaders won’t accept either option. Neither enables a business to provide the best solutions to their customers. And that is more important.

Because it’s their job to produce software as quickly as possible, developers have no problem working long hours to meet deadlines. Operations’ responsibility is to ensure the system’s stability, and they are aware of the dangers of rushing through changes without proper safeguards.

With the advent of DevOps, the software development and deployment process has been integrated into a single highly automated workflow with a shared goal: the rapid delivery of high-quality software that meets all user requirements while maintaining the integrity and stability of the entire system.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an approach to software development that emphasizes open lines of communication, teamwork, and integration between programmers and IT specialists. Developers and operations staff should collaborate to benefit the business, reducing friction and speeding up the process. Automated testing and deployment of software using configuration management, metrics and monitoring, a toolchain approach to tooling, and more.

A DevOps Engineer is responsible for managing and automating developing, testing, deploying, and supporting applications. This means he will be working closely with Development and Operations teams as part of a larger Software Engineering team. A DevOps engineer will be working on a variety of tasks, including:

How an organization moves from a traditional software development process to a new continuous delivery process is an important topic that deserves to be discussed because it will determine whether or not the organization will save time and money by adopting continuous delivery processes. Continuous delivery is about releasing software far more quickly while ensuring high quality.

Development and operations are referred to as “DevOps” informally. As a software development approach, it emphasizes exchanging information and ideas amongst programmers and IT specialists. It has been implemented in response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. With this approach, developers and operations staff work together to reduce friction and increase velocity.

Learn more on this dedicated article.

What’s the Difference Between DevOps and DevSecOps?

DevSecOps, DevOps, and SecOps are fused to create a cyclical system of information and practices from the software development, cybersecurity, and technology operations domains. When you standardize, automate, and shift your security processes to the left, you benefit from both methodologies while making your development processes more agile.

Responsibilities

DevSecOps aims to achieve the following:

  • Accelerate stable codebase and application development
  • Prioritize both development and security simultaneously.
  • Encourage the use of adaptable organizational structures and development methods.
  • Security and development teams should be able to help each other and continually improve.

Difference between SRE and DevOps

Site Reliability Engineering uses software engineering to solve problems in the real world. The word ‘Reliability’ signifies an SRE with a particular position in an organization and the Software Development Life Cycle. SREs instruct programmers on how to create dependable web services. In addition, they make certain that a company’s computer systems are up and running properly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Here, it’s critical to have high security, reliability, and scalability levels as the business requires reliable services.

Site reliability engineers use a software engineering approach to system administration as a link between development and operations. When it comes to increasing the availability and reliability of systems, Site Reliability Engineering focuses primarily on this. In contrast, DevOps emphasizes speed and delivery of new features while ensuring continuity.

A site reliability engineer (SRE) team consists of people with experience in operations and development. While QA experts, developers, engineers, SREs, and many others are all part of a DevOps team.

Responsibilities

SREs are responsible for ensuring that the systems and tools work as expected on the underlying infrastructure. As a result, they constantly monitor critical applications and services to ensure they do not go down.

An SRE is, thus, a critical job inside a business. Typical SRE activities include:

  • Develop and maintain scalable, secure, and stable systems
  • Perform an investigation into the occurrence.
  • Analyze performance and create improvement plans
  • Keep track of system performance.
  • Manage hazards
  • Automate manual operations inside the SDLC
  • Reduce the burden on engineers by automating service tools, logs, and testing environments.
  • Add new functions.
  • Select infrastructure tools
  • Adapt the environment to the changing amount of people using it.

Click here to learn more about SRE.

How do These Roles Interact with Each Other?

These techniques are built on the premise of collaboration and relationship building. All three practices, DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE, aim to close the gap between development and operations teams to deliver faster services.

Like DevOps, SRE is also about uniting development and operation teams, allowing them to see the other side of the process while introducing visibility to the whole application lifecycle.

To shorten the time between the moments a developer commits a change and when it is delivered to production, all titles call for automation and monitoring. DevOps and SREs aim to do so without compromising the quality of the code or product along the way.

Google itself argues that SRE and DevOps are not so different from one another: “they’re not two competing methodologies for software development and operations, but rather close allies aimed to tear through organizational barriers to produce better software faster.”

Can a company succeed in its infrastructure initiatives without these functions?

The short answer is yes. But how could it be done? The importance of infrastructure in a company’s IT business cannot be underestimated. Infrastructure is used for operating applications and services, which are the heart of the business. Conversely, this is the core factor of the “value chain” that keeps the business running. DevOps and SRE teams aim to create a smooth-running service by creating a flexible infrastructure with an appropriate toolset. But what exactly is infrastructure?

The IT infrastructure includes all the software, computers, and physical components that help run a company’s services. It is worth noting that in DevOps and SRE, the term “infrastructure” often refers to back-end processes and not hardware. This can be unclear when these terms are used interchangeably in an IT industry context.

The term “infrastructure” has been used broadly for decades. This approach is still used in many present-day IT organizations. Still, the idea behind DevOps and SRE is not to start from “scratch” but to reuse the existing tools and practices that are already available in a company’s IT operations.

Therefore, a company can achieve significant benefits by implementing the three methods outlined above on its own or by working with an expert.

Click here to learn more about the benefits of DevOps.

DevOps as a Service

Hiring in-house DevOps professionals becomes increasingly hard, as demand exceeds supply by far. This has led to the emergence of the DevOps services offering by many technology partners, more specialized or less.

This enables you to instantly augment your team with an experienced DevOps engineer, that is likely to provide value from day-1. The most common use case is using DevOps services for deeper infrastructure projects, rather than for their daily maintenance.

To learn more about the types of projects DevOps services can support, visit our DevOps page.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while DevOps and SRE can be implemented as separate efforts, both practices’ benefits come from their combination. Both require a certain amount of time, tools, and training to get started, but in the end, the cooperation between both teams will lead you to a more efficient and effective IT infrastructure.

As these functions become more mainstream in IT organizations, businesses must be ready to adapt their approach to innovation. Companies will continue to look for organizations that can deliver infrastructure projects on time, every time, and provide reliable services at the end of the day.With DevOps and SREs, you can help your business in this quest for scalability & efficacy.

If you consider DevOps as a service for your cloud initiatives, feel free to contact for a commitment-free advice.

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