Platform Engineer VS DevOps Vs SRE : Understanding the difference
Over the last few years the terms and roles of Platform engineer, DevOps & SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) have gained a lot of popularity. All three are related to the same field Software Development and Operations field but they all have different ror even overlapping responsibilities.
Image Credit:https://www.getambassador.io/blog/rise-of-cloud-native-engineering-organizations
As you can see in the image above, you can observe how teams are organized into Platform engineers and SRE, as well as how the teams measure the success of both. This will give you an idea of their differentiation. They collaborate with various teams, including multiple development teams. Now, in the following article, you will learn about SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineers separately.
What is Platform Engineer?
As we already discussed about platform engineering in our separate blog article (An Overview Of Platform Engineering) you will get the more insights about Platform engineering.
A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. Now-a-days platform engineer is becoming in trend because it guaranteed to provide the best experience to developer and speed up the product team. They also helps the work of developer more efficiently just by doing CI/CD pipelines, configuring IaC( Infrastructure as Code) to automate the cloud resources.
Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.
Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other stakeholders.
What is DevOps Engineer?
A Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery.
It characterises the take on the renewal of programmable infrastructure and expenditure, software development, industrialisation. In a company, it stimulates alliance and transmission.
DevOps have some procedures such as the CI/CD tool (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery) with an intensity of task automation. Microservices, Container, and executing together with the DevOps methodologies. Though it is clear that it has some methodologies, it is not a technology.
Image Credit: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/devops-tutorial/
As you can see in the above image , you can get some idea exactly about what is DevOps ? The two words define DevOps (Dev + Ops ) (software development and Operations) and in other words, you can say the assortment of software development and operation is known as DevOps.
It enhances the speed and quality of the application that has been delivering to an enormous extent and that’s why it’s becoming more prominent for the organization.
It provides you with the faster speed, security for your code, delivered quickly, these are some of the important features of using DevOps.
What is an SRE? (Site Reliability Engineering)
SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It has many more similarities to DevOps. Site reliability engineering was inaugurated by Ben TreynorSloss and the idea of SRE came from Google Engineering. The engineer who is working on Google has written SRE. There are two terms and components which are very valuable for SRE are automation and standardization. They always want to work in two ways either to automate operations tasks. It helps the team for its movability means if a team wants to move from a traditional approach to IT operations to a cloud-native method, then the SRE supports their team for that. For enhancing the integrity of software and the infrastructure which operates it and SRE furnishes incentive and expensive input.
Image Credit: https://www.devopsschool.com/blog/𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀-𝗩𝘀-𝗦𝗥𝗘-𝗩𝘀-𝗣𝗹𝗮/
This above image help you to know more about these three and get a better differentiation between DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering.
Main differences Between Platform Engineer, DevOps & SRE
| KEY DIFFERENCES | PLATFORM ENGINEER | DEVOPS | SRE |
| Automation | Platform engineer forces automation in CI/CD | DevOps encourages automation. It also uses automation in testing, monitoring, CI/CD. | Same as DevOps, SRE also encourages automation. |
| Communication& Collaboration
|
It facilitates the communication and it also collaborate between operation and development team. | As a core principle Devops also facilitates the communication and collaborate between operation and development team. | Same as platform engineer and DevOps SRE collaborate with operation and development team and also it deliver high-quality software. |
| Responsibility | A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications | DevOps are responsible for solving the trouble and production monitoring. | Same as DevOps but also uses the monitoring tools Grafana,Splunk. |
Conclusion:
So at the end we see that these three, DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering are very important approaches in the today’s software development world and each of these has its own unique function and their responsibility. A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. DevOps is a Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery. The team of SRE engineers works as a unit that uses the software tools for mointiring and unravelling any difficulties in managing the system.
We can say that the current fast-paced software development environments demand close collaboration among SRE, DevOps and Platform Engineering to meet various requirements for a seamless Development, Deployment, and improved production systems.
We can finally conclude that: Even though these roles are distinct, but their responsibilities may overlap, based on the needs and requirements of the organizations.
