Platform Engineering vs DevOps vs SRE - Understand the Differences

Platform Engineering, DevOps, and SRE are three critical fields that help organizations optimize their technology stack. Platform Engineering builds and manages scalable platforms. DevOps streamlines software delivery through collaboration and automation. And SRE combines software engineering and operations to ensure system reliability.

While these three fields share similarities, they have different priorities, responsibilities, and skill sets. Understanding these differences is essential for organizations that want to make informed decisions about their technology strategy.

In this article, we'll explore their core concepts, methodologies, and best practices and provide guidance on which approach might best fit your organization.

So, let's get started!

What is SRE?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that blends software engineering and operations to ensure that complex systems perform optimally.

SRE teams are responsible for building and maintaining large-scale, distributed systems that power everything from e-commerce sites to social media platforms.

Their goal is to ensure that systems are available and performing optimally, with minimal downtime or disruption to users. To achieve this, SRE teams use various tools and techniques, including automation, monitoring, and incident response.

SRE has become a critical function in many modern tech organizations. And Particularly those that rely on cloud-based infrastructure and mission-critical applications.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that brings together software development and IT operations to improve software delivery's speed, efficiency, and quality.

DevOps helps teams work efficiently, break down silos, and improve communication between departments by promoting collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery.

This approach has become critical in modern tech organizations, particularly those embracing cloud-based infrastructure and agile development methodologies.

By embracing DevOps principles, teams can deliver software products faster, with fewer errors, and at a lower cost. Overall giving them a competitive advantage in today's fast-paced digital world.

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering involves building and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that support software development teams. Its goal is to create a stable, secure, and scalable platform for developers to build and deploy applications efficiently.

Platform Engineers choose the right hardware and software and design secure and scalable systems.

They also develop and maintain tools and processes that support the software development lifecycle, like source control management, continuous integration and deployment, and automated testing and monitoring.

Platform Engineering helps development teams focus on building applications by providing a stable, secure, and scalable platform. This is particularly critical in modern tech organizations that embrace cloud-based infrastructure and microservices architecture.

Also Read: Kubernetes vs OpenShift

SRE vs DevOps vs Platform Engineering: Roles & Responsibilities

SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering are related but distinct roles in modern tech organizations. While there is some overlap in their responsibilities, each role has its unique focus and skill set.

Let's look closely at each role and its typical job descriptions.

Roles of a Site Reliability Engineer

• Ensuring high availability, reliability, and scalability of systems and applications

• Building and operating reliable systems using automation and monitoring

• Collaborating with development teams to improve the reliability of software

• Responding to incidents and conducting post-mortem analysis to prevent future incidents

• Building and maintaining tools for monitoring, logging, and alerting

Roles of a DevOps Engineer

• Automating software development lifecycle processes, from source control management to deployment and monitoring

• Breaking down silos between development and operations teams

• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for efficient and reliable software delivery

• Ensuring infrastructure as code and configuration management best practices

• Building and maintaining tools for automation and monitoring

Roles of a Platform Engineer

• Building and maintaining infrastructure and tools that support software development teams

• Selecting the right hardware and software and designing secure and scalable systems

• Developing and maintaining tools and processes that support the software development lifecycle, like source control management, continuous integration and deployment, and automated testing and monitoring

• Providing a stable, secure, and scalable platform for developers to build and deploy applications efficiently

• Ensuring compliance with security and regulatory requirements.

SRE vs. DevOps vs. Platform Engineering: Scope of Work

SRE

SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, is about ensuring systems and applications' availability, reliability, and scalability. SREs work to reduce the risk of incidents and minimize their impact on the end user.

Their scope of work includes:

• Designing and implementing reliability and fault-tolerant systems and architectures

• Developing monitoring and alerting tools to proactively detect and resolve issues before they cause user impact

• Conducting post-mortem analyses to determine the root cause of incidents and identifying opportunities to improve system reliability

• Participating in incident response, including responding to alerts, performing triage and troubleshooting, and driving resolution

• Automating manual processes to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of human error

DevOps

DevOps, on the other hand, focuses on breaking down silos between development and operations teams to accelerate software delivery and improve quality.

The scope of work for DevOps includes:

• Automating software development processes, from code commits to deployment and testing

• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines to enable fast and reliable software delivery

• Managing infrastructure as code to ensure consistency and repeatability across environments

• Collaborating with developers to improve the quality of code and resolve issues quickly

• Monitoring systems to identify and resolve issues proactively

Platform Engineering

Finally, Platform Engineering focuses on building and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that support software development teams.

The scope of work for Platform Engineering includes:

• Designing and implementing secure and scalable systems and architectures

• Building and maintaining platforms for software development and delivery, including source control, build systems, testing and deployment tools, and infrastructure automation

• Providing a stable, secure, and scalable platform for developers to build and deploy applications efficiently

• Ensuring compliance with security and regulatory requirements

• Automating manual processes to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of human error

Also Read: Top CI/CD Best Practices

SRE vs. DevOps vs. Platform Engineering - Use Cases

SREs ensure system reliability, scalability, and availability, including building and maintaining infrastructure and automating processes.

DevOps seeks to break down barriers between development and operations teams by automating software development, improving code quality, and building CI/CD pipelines.

Platform Engineering focuses on building and maintaining infrastructure and tools supporting software development teams, ensuring compliance, and providing platforms for efficient application deployment.

Understanding the strengths and capabilities of each role can help organizations design more resilient and efficient software development processes, improving quality and efficiency.

SRE vs. DevOps vs. Platform Engineering - Team Examples

In many organizations, SREs, DevOps, and Platform Engineering teams work closely together to deliver high-quality software efficiently and reliably.

Here are some examples of how these teams collaborate:

SREs and DevOps

SREs and DevOps teams often work together to design and implement automated monitoring and incident response tools to ensure system reliability.

For example, an SRE team may work with a DevOps team to implement a tool like PagerDuty for incident response, with alerts automatically triggering response workflows that address the issue in real-time.

Platform Engineering and DevOps

Platform Engineering and DevOps teams may collaborate on building a continuous delivery pipeline that improves software delivery speed and quality.

For instance, a Platform Engineering team may provide the necessary infrastructure and tooling to support continuous delivery.

While a DevOps team builds and maintains the automated testing and deployment pipelines that ensure high-quality software is released quickly and efficiently.

DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering

DevOps teams may work with SRE and Platform Engineering teams to optimize the software development process.

For example, a DevOps team may work with an SRE team to design and implement automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tools.

This is to streamline software delivery. While also working with a Platform Engineering team to develop a centralized logging and monitoring solution.

This is to design an easily integrated into the continuous delivery pipeline.

Also Read: Top Kubernetes Best Practices

SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering teams use specific tools and technologies to support their work.

Here are some commonly used tools by each team:

Common Tools Used by Site Reliability Engineers

SREs typically use tools for monitoring and incident response to ensure system reliability.

Some examples of tools used by SREs include:

• Prometheus for monitoring

• Grafana for data visualization

• PagerDuty for incident management

Common Tools Used by DevOps Engineers

DevOps teams rely on tools for automation, continuous integration and delivery, and collaboration to streamline the software delivery process.

Some examples of tools used by DevOps teams include:

• Jenkins for continuous integration

• GitLab for version control

• Docker for containerization

Common Tools Used by Platform Engineers

Platform Engineering teams focus on designing and building the infrastructure and tooling necessary to support efficient software delivery.

Some examples of tools used by Platform Engineering teams include:

• Kubernetes for container orchestration

• Terraform for infrastructure provisioning

• Ansible for configuration management

SRE vs DevOps vs Platform Engineering in the Automation Era

SRE teams focus on ensuring the reliability and availability of systems through automation, monitoring, and incident response.

They use tools like automation frameworks, monitoring and alerting systems, and incident management platforms to quickly identify and respond to issues.

DevOps teams aim to streamline the software delivery process by automating as much of it as possible.

They use continuous integration and delivery platforms, configuration management systems, and collaboration tools to automate everything from testing and deployment to infrastructure provisioning.

Platform Engineering teams focus on building and maintaining the infrastructure and tooling needed to support efficient software delivery.

They use container orchestration systems, infrastructure-as-code tools, and configuration management systems to automate the process of building, deploying, and scaling applications.

Also Read: Horizontal Scaling vs Vertical Scaling

Similarities between SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering

While SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering teams each have unique roles and responsibilities, there are also some similarities. Here are a few:

Automation

All three teams heavily rely on automation to streamline their work and improve efficiency. They use tools and platforms to automate tasks like deployment, scaling, testing, and monitoring.

Collaboration

All three teams need to work closely with developers, operations teams, and other stakeholders to ensure the smooth functioning of software delivery. They use collaboration tools and platforms to communicate, share information, and work effectively.

Continuous Improvement

SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineering teams aim to continuously improve the software delivery process. They analyze data and metrics, identify areas of improvement, and implement changes to make the process faster, more efficient, and more reliable.

Customer Focus

All three teams work with a customer-centric mindset, aiming to deliver software that meets end-users' needs. They focus on user experience, reliability, and speed of delivery, ensuring that the software can deliver business value.

While these teams have some similarities, it's important to understand their distinct roles and responsibilities to effectively leverage their expertise and capabilities.

What Does Platform Engineering and SRE Mean in DevOps?

In the context of DevOps, Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) are two important practices that help organizations to build and run reliable and scalable systems.

Here's what each of these practices means in the context of DevOps:

Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering focuses on building and managing the underlying infrastructure and platform that supports the delivery and operation of software.

This includes designing and building scalable and resilient infrastructure, managing cloud-based services, automating deployments, and ensuring the availability and performance of the platform.

SRE

SRE is a practice that emphasizes the reliability and resilience of software systems.

It involves applying engineering principles and practices to the operation of systems, focusing on automating and improving operational processes, monitoring system performance and reliability, and proactively identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.

Both Platform Engineering and SRE are important practices in DevOps, as they help organizations to build and operate software systems that are reliable, scalable, and resilient.

By leveraging these practices, organizations can improve their agility, reduce downtime, and deliver higher-quality software to their users.

Also Read: Orchestration vs Choreography in Microservices

SRE vs Platform Engineer vs DevOps: Which One Should You Choose for Your Career?

SRE, Platform Engineering, and DevOps are three distinct job roles in the tech industry, each with unique skill sets, responsibilities, and career paths.

SRE focuses on ensuring the reliability and stability of applications and services. They use a data-driven approach and automate processes as much as possible.

DevOps aims to improve collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, focusing on delivering software faster and more reliably.

Platform Engineering focuses on building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure and platforms that support applications and services.

While there are some similarities between these roles, such as the use of automation and the focus on collaboration, they each have a distinct scope of work and set of responsibilities.

When considering a career in these fields, it's important to understand your strengths and interests and the market demand and average salaries in your area.

Ultimately, choosing which role to pursue should depend on your interests and career goals. It's also worth noting that these roles are not mutually exclusive, and many organizations have hybrid positions that combine elements of multiple roles.

Further Reading