by Angela Guess
Donald Fischer recently wrote in TechCrunch, “Once a rarefied in-house role at a few leading Internet companies such as LinkedIn and PayPal, data science has since grown into a global phenomenon, impacting organizations of all sizes across many industries. More recently, a buzzy new job title has emerged from the same group of companies: that of site reliability engineer, or SRE. Will SREs follow the same path of rapid growth that data scientists did before them? Before we dive into that question, let’s consider the context that has led to the creation of site reliability engineering.”
Fischer goes on, “Over the last 15 years, the largest Internet properties have quietly led a revolution in IT technology. The reason is simple: Traditional corporate data center techniques simply would not efficiently scale up to the level that is required to run a global service like Google or Facebook. Instead, these companies have had to innovate at all layers of the technology stack, from hardware to networking to applications. In many cases, the resulting building blocks have been released as open source software packages, or have inspired third parties to create their own versions. Now, organizations ranging from startups to the largest Fortune 500 enterprises are adopting these technologies for their own purposes. Examples of this phenomenon are numerous.”
photo credit: Flickr/ tec_estromberg