The role of the SRE in DevOps has become that much more crucial as software development covers that much more ground than in the past. Since becoming part of DevOps, SREs have been required to play a very active part throughout the production pipeline environment as well as during the post-deployment stage of software and application rollouts. When cloud native platforms and porting legacy systems to the cloud are added to the mix or deploying applications to on-premise and cloud environments simultaneously, the SRE’s responsibility becomes that much more critical.

The SRE also must nimbly assume many of the tasks previously reserved for operations. While gone are the days when a single “operations guy” or team managed a data center, an SRE can still get that dreaded call or page at 3:00 AM when an applications crashes. But at the same time, as we see below, many of those operations-like tasks should become automated in the near future, so SREs can spend more time on what they usually like to do best: working directly with code development.

Three SRE and engineering thought leaders from software giant and services provider Oracle obviously had a lot to say about the SRE’s role and DevOps tools at their disposal during a podcast hosted by Libby Clark, editorial director of The New Stack, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference held in Barcelona at the end of May. The podcasts guests from Oracle included:

Dr. Jonathan Reeve, senior director, product management;

Mickey Boxell, product manager, SRE;

Timothy J. Fontaine, software engineer and consulting member of technical staff.