Why Site Reliability Engineers

According to the Upskilling report 2021, the demand for site reliability engineers stood at 22% but is expected to double in 2022. This is a clear indication that demand for site reliability engineers is about to explode in the coming months. Even though the core responsibility of the site reliability engineer remains the same, which is to ensure reliability and efficiency of the current system, their role will continue to evolve as new challenges continue to emerge.

They will also have to play a crucial role when it comes to developing and implementing automated software tools. Due to this, they will have to work in collaboration with software development teams and operations teams. As more and more businesses jump on the cloud bandwagon, they will have to ensure round-the-clock application and network availability to ensure smoother business operations.

They will also establish benchmarks that can give them a better idea about the performance of their systems. Moreover, they must implement an alert mechanism that can raise the red flag whenever there is something wrong. This will enable businesses to respond to issues faster and minimize downtime. Apart from that, they must ensure the presence of a closed loop process to deliver better support to clients.

In this article, you will learn about seven reasons why the demand for site reliability engineers will skyrocket in 2022 and beyond.

7 Reasons Why Site Reliability Engineers Will Be In High Demand In 2022

Here are seven reasons why site reliability engineers will be in high demand in years to come.

1. Removing Performance Roadblocks

Despite having state of the art IT infrastructure, businesses fail to take full advantage of them. This is due to the performance bottlenecks present in the system. With increased focus on optimizations, businesses are hiring site reliability engineers who can remove all the performance roadblocks. You can also buy dedicated server hosting. This will help businesses realize the full potential of their current IT infrastructure.

The good thing about site reliability engineers is that they can also fine tune your workflows and processes so it can not only deliver better efficiency but can also improve the resilience and reliability of these workflows. All this reduces technical debt and drastically improves the customer experience.

1. Shift Towards Microservices and Containers

Software development is not what it used to be a decade ago. The focus has shifted towards containers and microservices. This has forced businesses to adopt them for software development. They started with using containers in a production environment but have now graduated to microservices. This transition is not easy to make especially if you don’t have engineers who can help you maintain the highest quality of service and ensure reliability of software being developed. Site reliability engineers can also assist businesses in managing full application stack more smartly. All this translates into more efficient software development.

1. Real Time Solutions To Complex Problems

What really makes site reliability engineers more demanding than other IT roles is their ability to provide real time solutions to complicated problems. Their investigative nature helps them identify the root cause of the problem quickly and provide a suitable solution to fix that problem. Since, they can identify the main cause early, they can fix the problem faster no matter how complex it might be. Very few individuals can mimic that capability even in large size enterprises.  That is the main reason why businesses are looking to pay handsome salaries to site reliability engineers. They can make a huge contribution towards the success of the overall team.

1. Rapid DevOps Adoption

Another factor that is fueling the demand for site reliability engineers is the faster adoption of DevOps by businesses and enterprises. In a DevOps environment, their goal is to achieve sustainable growth. To achieve this goal, they play an important part in enhancing the IT services within the organizations and bring continuous business improvements. These site reliability engineers can turbo charge the quality assurance process by making it more proactive instead of reactive. Due to this, you get software that continues towards making your business processes more reliable and provide stability your business needs to grow. So whether you need to report and fix issues faster or improve production, you can do all that.,

1. Eliminating Siloed Processes

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when implementing DevOps is that they focus too much on technology and processes but pay little to no attention to people and organization culture. As a result, they succeed  in applying DevOps as far as technology is concerned but fall short when it comes to people. Siloed processes, poor organizational culture leads their Benefits of Deploy MLOps initiative towards failure.

Site reliability engineers help them eliminate siloed processes and foster collaboration. These site reliability engineers act as a bridge between both the development and options team. Not only that, they can teach developers on how they can create secure and reliable services but can also assist the operations team in keeping the systems up and running at all times. This is what makes them highly valuable.

1. Thriving In Competitive Markets

Having a site reliability engineer in your team is no longer optional, it is the need of the day. Some experts might even go as far as to say that they are necessary for the survival of your organization. Site reliability engineers are capable of wearing multiple hats at once. They know how to code in multiple programming languages and have a diverse knowledge base. This means that whether it is cloud computing, containerization, virtualization, Kubernates or anything else, they are familiar with all these concepts and can contribute in all these domains. So, if you are planning to jump into any of these competitive markets, having a site reliability engineer is a must.

1. Reliable Service Delivery

Nothing damages your business as badly as an outage or business disruption. You not only lose out on revenue but the downtime can also put a huge dent in your brand reputation. Site reliability engineers can help you prevent such incidents. With cloud and microservices adoption, scalability and accessibility is no longer the issue but maintaining the quality of service is. Site reliability engineers ensure continuous service delivery without any interruption so your business can thrive.

Why would you hire a site reliability engineer for your business? Share it with us in the comments section below.