SRE is the one whose main focus is to look after operation problems in the DevOps lifecycle. It has some set of tools through it works.
SRE is also the same as DevOps but the only thing which makes it different is its main focus which is towards operational problems.
It has been originated in Google company. As you might have never experienced any downtime in Google apps, they always work smoothly even when they work over the apps or services provided through other channels. This smoothness happens with the Google team which is SRE.
SRE is the one who looks after this operation works who 24 Hrs monitors the availability and health of the operational services. SRE is very important nowadays. This is why SRE has precious value in the DevOps process.
Monitoring is a very important aspect of any service because it’s the one who tells about the current health and functions availability of Application.
SRE has a group of teams whose only work is to monitor as well as predict the future consequences, so they can work on that to remove that vulnerability.
SRE is a process that works with software engineers and emphasizes automation solutions to ensure continuously delivered applications are working efficiently and reliably. A major focus of SREs is the desire to never see the solved issue again, often using automation as a resolution.
The role of SRE in DevOps is to ensure that the apps and services that have been developed are available to end-users and should function effectively and reliably. Although SRE and DevOps are two distinct disciplines.
What are the benefits of SRE?
⦁ Observability into the health of services:
⦁ Stronger ties between developers and operations
⦁ Modernization of the NOC
⦁ Organization of on-call structures and alerting workflows
⦁ The surfacing of production concerns
⦁ Stewardship across engineering teams
Top 10 Tools For SRE Engineers
Jira – Jira is a tool that helps in managing work. Jira was brought into the picture in 2002. Prior it was designed to track the issue and project management tool but today it has been evolved with more features that can be used in different cases to agile software development. Jira is a central hub for coding, collaboration, and release phases.
It integrates with the CI/CD tools to feature clarity in the software development lifecycle.
Jira help in focusing on shipping faster, better software by integrating with Atlassian and vendor tools. It can also integrate with first and third-party tools including version control tools like bit bucket, Gitlab, etc, as well as management tools like Confluence and also monitoring and operating tools like Opsgenie.
In the Jira tool, you can build a roadmap that is connected with the project work and it enables you to sketch a longer-term view of the work also to share and track the progress of the roadmap.
Jenkins – Jenkins is an open-source automation tool that is used to build and test the product, so the developers can continuously integrate changes into the build as well as it provides continuous integration and continuous delivery of projects. Jenkins provides various plugins to support building, deploying, and automating any work project.
Jenkins can be utilized as a simple CI server as well as can be changed into a continuous delivery hub for any ongoing project. Jenkins is a self-reliant java-based program and comes to run with packages for Windows, Linux, macOS, and other UNIX-like operating systems.
Jenkins can distribute the work in various machines, helping drive builds, tests, and faster deployment over various platforms.
New relic – New relic is a tool that focuses on performance and availability monitoring. It helps in tracking the performance of distributed apps and services.
New relic helps SRE’s create and monitor custom data sets.
Kubernetes – Kubernetes is the modern method to automate Linux container operations. Kubernetes helps in easily and efficiently managing clusters that run Linux containers over public, private, or hybrid clouds.
Kubernetes is an open-source tool that “containerizes” work pressures, manages deployment and configurations. Kubernetes maintains by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Kubernetes can automatically make changes in the configuration of deployed containers or even deploy new containers based on metrics it tracks or requests made by engineers. Handling these processes through Kubernetes saves time, eliminates hard work, increases consistency. Kubernetes allows the creation of custom resources based on specific applications.
In Kubernetes, the Operator can be able to alter the configuration and usage of an application based on the application’s output. SRE tools always invest in reliability.
Terraform – Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that permits to build, and change infrastructure. It comprises low-level components such as compute instances, storage, and networking, as well as high-level components such as DNS entries, SaaS features, etc.
Terraform can handle existing service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
Terraform generates a plan that defines what its plan to do and asks for your approval before making any infrastructure changes, this process allows you to review changes before Terraform creates, updates or destroys infrastructure.
Terraform build a resource graph and modifies non-dependent resources in parallel. This allows Terraform to build resources and gives you greater insight into your infrastructure.
Terraform allows us to use a common configuration language to interact with different cloud providers. Terraform focuses on immutability, which is better for cloud, or hybrid environments.
Terraform assist several cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS, IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix), Google Cloud Platform, Linode, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and many more.
Ansible – Ansible is an open-source configuration management tool and Somewhere it functions like terraform but still, there are some differences between both.
Ansible is more focused on mutability, where resources can be changed rather than destroyed.
Ansible merges workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in an easy-to-utilize and deploys platform. Ansible is for automating repetitive tasks, running infrastructure at scale, and increasing deployment frequency.
Building a CI/CD pipeline needs buy-in from numerous teams. It can’t be done without a simple automation platform that everyone in an organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keeps applications properly deployed and managed in the entire lifecycle.
Configurations can’t define your environment alone. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and make sure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of difficulty and chaos, Ansible brings order.
When it comes to defining your application with Ansible and managing the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams can manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.
Network implementations and alterations are no longer being done manually on the network hardware itself, but automating the process to reduce human mistakes and hard work.
Datadog – Datadog functions as cloud monitoring. Datadog can be used to view existing infrastructure hosts, collect events, and many more as well as datadog features to customize integrate the solution with other systems.
Datadog Application Performance Monitoring offers end-to-end distributed tracing from frontend devices to databases. By seamlessly associating distributed traces with frontend and backend data, Datadog APM allows you to monitor service dependencies, decrease latency, and eliminate errors so your users get the best experience.
Datadog supports organizations that encourage a culture of observability, collaboration, and data-sharing, all of that are key pillars of the DevOps movement.
DevOps is a culture and Datadog is part of the authorization of that process by permitting different parts of the business to interact with a common observability platform.
Datadog allows organizations to implement monitoring automation with options like Autodiscovery for automatic configuration of monitoring checks, moreover monitoring-as-code integrations with configuration management and deployment tools.
Datadog provides a range of vision into the health and performance of other tools within the DevOps toolchain, Thus organizations can make sure that their CI/CD systems, configuration management tools, and orchestration platforms are operating as predicted.
Datadog permits any user over the organization to evaluate data in the same context as other users, creating collaboration and information sharing.
Using Datadog notebooks, any user can create shareable, cooperative documents that weave interactive graphs with the analytical statement, Thus teams can quickly come to a consensus about the reason for an outage or performance issue.
The single most fun part about Datadog is that we can have one pane of glass, with everything that we’d like as way as serverless, logs, metrics, and third-party integrations, that all come together so we can quickly figure out any issues if there in our stack.
Pagerduty – An incident management tool with a real-time operations platform that makes sure no blackout.
There are various main roles of incident response teams at PagerDuty. There can be different kinds of incidents that require sometimes one or sometimes multiple members. It’s all about working as a team to ensure there is no problem and getting solutions quickly.
Functions of Pagerduty in some incidents are –
On-Call Management – Flexible programme, escalations, & alerts.
Incident Response – Automated.
Runbook Automation – Decrease toil and focus on important works.
Intelligent Event Management – Strong context & noise reduction at scale.
Splunk – Splunk is a software function as monitors, searches, analyzes, and visualizes the real-time system-generated data. It provides easy to access data for easy diagnostics and solutions to various problems.
Splunk offers some advantages like enhanced GUI, real-time visibility, reduces troubleshooting and maintaining time by offering instant results, root cause analysis, and allows generating graphs, alerts, and dashboards. It also offers easy search and investigates specific results using Splunk as well as allows troubleshooting any condition of failure for improved performance.
It offers help in monitoring business metrics and gathering useful Operational Intelligence from your machine data. It Summarizes and collects valuable information from different logs.
Some Features are:-
⦁ boost development and testing
⦁ allow building real-time data applications.
⦁ Generate ROI faster
⦁ Agile statistics and reporting with Real-time architecture
⦁ Offers search, analysis, and visualization abilities to empower users.
Slack – Slack is a communication tool that is generally used by companies to keep the members in touch and to communicate whenever they feel the need.
SRE teams use it for messaging each other as well as like a programmatic platform that helps automate responses and coordinate events. Slack provides a closed and secure environment to chat and can integrate with operational systems to push notifications and alerts to SRE teams.
Some features are –
⦁ Pinning messages and reference links to channels.
⦁ Managing and tracking documents.
⦁ Advanced search modifiers.
⦁ Using shared channels across workspaces.
⦁ Streamlining your sidebar.
⦁ Lightning-quick navigation.
⦁ Setting reminders.
Conclusion
As we discussed above it shows SRE Comes out as a best supporting partner of DevOps and its really necessary in operations process. The tools are really helpful in SRE process through their feature functions which automates the various works. It seems SRE plays an important role in DevOps which makes the operations process smoothly and reliable functioning. So SRE keeps its own importance in DevOps.
Training related details
To get the Practical knowledge of SRE tools is best from DevOpsSchool. Its one of the best in providing training. So if any of you is looking to get trained and for certification then you guys can look into this platform. It offers real life practical sessions which can expand your knowledge as well as resume.