Site reliability engineering (SRE) teams and platform engineering teams have comparable goals and approaches, such as maximising automation and lowering toil. They do, however, have different priorities and employ slightly different instruments to attain them.

What exactly are SREs? What exactly are platform engineers? What similarities and differences exist between each role? This post will provide answers to all of your questions.

SREs and Platform Engineers' Responsibilities

Site reliability engineers' primary role is to ensure that IT systems are dependable, which means that they meet performance criteria. Working with developers and IT operations teams to maximise the stability of applications as they go down the software delivery pipeline is part of their job.

Platform engineers, on the other hand, concentrate on controlling and optimising the software delivery process. Consider this role to be one that puts DevOps ideas into reality by figuring out how to achieve continuous delivery, continuous improvement, and other DevOps initiatives.

As a result, both SREs and platform engineers play a role in overseeing the software delivery process and determining how to make it as smooth and efficient as feasible. They also share a common foe: labour, in the sense that both groups strive to eliminate laborious, wasteful operations by automating as much as possible. SREs, for example, use technologies to automate complex incident response processes, whereas platform engineers may use approaches such as GitOps to automate various portions of software delivery.

SRE and Platform Engineering Distinctions

SRE and platform engineering, on the other hand, are distinct roles. The main distinctions are as follows:

Goals: SREs' primary responsibility is to maximise dependability, which is distinct from enhancing the speed and efficiency of software delivery operations. Even if your software distribution chain is manual and slow, you may theoretically have a highly dependable system.

Platform engineers' primary focus is on software delivery operations. SREs are concerned about software delivery as well, because the manner applications are built affects reliability and problem resolution. However, SREs also have numerous other responsibilities, such as incident response and infrastructure management, that go beyond the realm of software delivery.

SREs rely on technologies to assist them identify and resolve various types of reliability issues. Platform engineers, on the other hand, use tools such as source code managers and continuous integration (CI) servers to help automate software delivery.

As a result, while SREs and platform engineers may utilise comparable approaches and have similar abilities, their day-to-day operations are fundamentally different.

Should You Work as an SRE or Platform Engineer?

Given the overlap in abilities between SRE and platform engineering, certain engineers are well-suited to either profession. But which is better in terms of a career?

Salary-wise, there isn't much of a difference. According to Glassdoor, the average income for platform engineers is around £88,200, compared to £97,500 for SREs. SREs may earn a little more (and it's worth mentioning that SRE salaries can vary greatly), but the pay gap isn't as large as the one between, instance, IT operations engineers (who earn a meagre £59,000, according to Glassdoor) and SREs.

In terms of demand, the roles are also comparable. Unlike software engineering or even DevOps engineering, SRE and platform engineering are roles that have only recently gained popularity. SRE has been around for a while—it began at Google in the early 2000s—but it wasn't until recently that most firms began looking for SREs for their teams. Similarly, platform engineering did not become a thing until the introduction of microservices and cloud-native things compelled businesses to invest more engineering resources to managing their increasingly complicated software delivery processes.

This means that, for the time being, it is simple to get positions in SRE and platform engineering if you have the necessary abilities. Many businesses are keen to fill both sorts of positions.

Choosing the correct career for you, then, is primarily determined by your tastes and working style. A platform engineer's life is likely to be more predictable than an SRE's because platform engineers do not have to take the lead in resolving problems when anything goes wrong at 2:00 a.m. SREs, on the other hand, have a more varied set of duties, which can make the work more interesting—especially if software delivery platforms like Git or Jenkins don't get you out of bed in the morning.

Conclusion

Platform engineers and SREs are critical in automating complicated processes and eliminating manual labour. They approach these difficulties, however, from different perspectives and with distinct techniques. The best role for you is determined by what you enjoy doing the most.