InfluxData is a sponsor of The New Stack.

When Gianluca Arbezzano, now a site reliability engineer (SRE) for InfluxData, first approached Chris Churilo, director of product marketing, over two years ago, what an SRE was and did was a largely nebulous concept for him.”I was looking at myself more as a DevOps person, but I was never a systems administration,” Arbezzano said. “I always wrote code and automated [applications and deployments].”

Initially, when Arbezzano reached out to InfluxData, “he said he was a fan of InfluxDB and we just hit it off and I said ‘we’ve got to do something together,’ Churilo said. Arbezzano then grew into the role from there and has since been instrumental in helping InfluxData in a number of ways, including helping to automate InfluxCloud processes and making sure customer deployments remain on track.

In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Arbezzano and Churilo discussed what is like to be an SRE today and how it all fits together in InfluxData’s quest to help customers improve observability and analytics and automation with its time series platform.