Title: SRE – what does it imply as a tester?

SRE adoption grew in each and every Organization from 10% in 2019 to 20% in 2022 which means every organization needs the skilled SRE role and Many Large companies across Industry verticals have adopted SRE – Google, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Target, IBM, Xero, Oracle, Zalando, Acquia,  GitHub. SRE skills as a must-have skill in the process and framework skill domain  – voted by 47% of survey respondents in 2021 compared to 28% in 2020 

SRE does not only support faster to the market but also helps Agility team to service reliability. SRE is an extended level of Devops which constructs on three Pillars i.e. 

1. Technical Capabilities i.e. Monitoring , Alerting , Reliability , Security etc. 
2. SRE Adoption Framework and Ways of Working ie. Ways of Working , Operational Models, Governance etc. 
3. Process Capabilities – Incident management , Release Management etc. 

While all of these are key Pillars of engineering tied to development and operations, close observation tells you that there is a lot of testing involved in all of this to have all the pillars aligned. Most of the systems are moving to Microservices architecture instead of Monolithic and Site Reliability is the major purpose to adopt SRE which means more testing is involved to ensure systems are reliable.  

Most of the Organizations are adopting SRE Practice and make the necessity of Site Reliability Engineer with specific skill set to perform roles and responsibilities who take care of daily tasks ie. Automation of manual tasks , Performance and Chaos Engineering , Release Management etc. So, from my point of view SRE is not the new job but an advanced role of Devops Engineer which involves System Admin, Software Development, Devops skillset is necessary. SRE Validation approach should cover all the aspects i.e. Technical Capabilities , Ways of Work and Process Capabilities which have the scope different type of testing like Canary Testing , Reliability Testing , Failure Testing , Chaos Testing etc.  

AWS as the IaaS is also SRE proof of concept to meet Reliability which involves the ability of system to recover from infra or service disruptions and based on the Well-structured design Principles i.e. Test , Automate , Scale out , Stop Guessing and Automate Change. If want to have reliable service , we must define “reliability” based out on 3’S i.e. SLA , SLO and SLI and determine the impact of Reliability with defining an error Budget ( tool to determine Reliability) and accepting failures to make it the part of Design Process is the End to End SRE. AWS already proves gaining of Resilience and Reliability after adopting SRE Practices for many of the services i.e .  AWS Global , Regional and Zonal Architecture Design , AWS Databases , Lamba , EC2 etc. 

Key Take Aways: 

1. SRE as Testing as A Service and Construct Elements 
2. SRE Architect – A Day in life and Required Skill Set  
3. SRE Validation Approach and Types of Testing 
4. AWS – SRE Principles Adoption , Gaining Resilience and Reliability