SREs + Software Engineers: Making It Work

Just got sent a binary to deploy - by email? Been told ‘it works on my machine’? Or that monitoring isn’t a big deal because ‘I’ll notice if it goes down'?

As companies and infrastructure scale, the need for individuals with skills outside of those taught in typical CS programmes becomes more apparent. However, this doesn’t replace the roles of more traditional software engineers. As one of these engineers who have worked with SREs and done SRE work ourselves, I discuss the ways in which SREs can be integrated into a broader engineering org. From complete role separation to Jack and Jills of all trades and finally to Facebook’s more nuanced approach, I look at why this integration is important and the ways in which it can make all involved more effective.

Nina is currently working as a software engineer on Facebook’s deployment infrastructure. There she gets to use the words “container,” “scale,” and “failure domain” at least five or six times a day. Before that she worked on AWS EC2 in sunny Cape Town.