The journey to become SRE Engineer

People are not born as Engineers, and more to that – they are not born as SRE Engineers 😎

SREs are pretty unique in the industry, they cover a lot of areas and are often being asked to be the pioneers in a new area where the company wishes to venture to.

To road to be one is a combination of several roles that you would like to cover to build yourself as an SRE.

Nobody expects you to go thru all the roles below, but having some experience in them would make it way easier for you.

Support

SREs have a lot in common with the support team, As in some organizations the support team is the first line of defense and in others, SREs are the ones to get the page.

Nevertheless, SREs are a support team in their nature where their clients are the developers and the platform.

Operations

It can be a NOC Engineer (Network Operation Center), a good ol’style system admin, and any engineer who interacts with production operations.

Monitoring

Again NOC Engineer plays a good role here as it gives a very solid understanding of writing runbooks (some call them playbooks or cookbooks) and interacting with much different monitoring and alerting tools.

Decisions are always data-driven, we do not guess and alerts are based on a measurable SLO (Service Level Objective).

Software Engineers (SWE)

A major area of the SRE is to write tools for self-use and tools for the various teams to leverage, having a strong skills

Automation

QA and System Admins are good candidates to culture your automation skills, writing scripts to automate tasks, scale machines, data manipulation toward reports and reduce toil.

After all, we are lazy engineers that don’t want to repeat routine tasks. 😂

Architect and Design

SREs will often be called to help design a robust and reliable approach for solving a problem or deploying a system that can be easy to scale and manage. Having previous experience writing design docs and planning will give a nice ground.

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