Should you do DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering?
- The best companies I know do DevOps.
Everybody does on-call and carries the pager.
Everybody is responsible for keeping the lights on, whether they are L1, L2, or L3.
That's a good thing because it doesn't matter what you're doing if your customers can't access your service.
- The best companies I know also do SRE.
They have central teams that organize the response to large-scale events, provide tracking for operational excellence campaigns, etc.
That's necessary because it helps generate expertise that can be shared across a broader group, which helps with large-scale event management, building tools for it, and so forth.
- Every company past a certain size does platform engineering.
They have a central team responsible for vending infrastructure, ensuring consistency, doing chargebacks, tagging, and ensuring security, which are the central tenets of platform engineering.
So it's not clear that there's as much of a difference as people claim because the best companies I know do all three.
If you’re proposing a change, you must ask:
- How is it going to reduce incidents?
- How will it improve availability?
- How will it reduce toil?
- How is it going to affect the customer?
Here are my suggestions for making changes:
- When you make changes, ensure that you're making things better and not just shifting work from one team to another.
- As you think about centralization vs. decentralization of authority, ask yourself: Who is going to benefit overall – your customer? the decentralized team you’re taking work away from? And how will we measure it?
- Finally, and most importantly, can teams opt out if it isn't working for them?
I've seen in the past that centralization improves efficiency and consistency, but it can reduce innovation and ownership.
There's a cost-benefit trade-off with each one of these things.
And that's the discussion we must have, not about abstract notions of organizational philosophies.
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