This is an opinion piece I'm writing for fun. Please don't take this seriously.
I'm an SRE. I've been a SysAdmin. I've been in Operations. I've been in tech support. I've been in this industry a long enough time to see the relationships between these titles and the tasks therein.
Here's my short list of the evolution of SRE, showing how technology evolves and titles mean things. For me, this has been a career evolution, as I've moved generally through these titles as I worked through my career, but titles like "DevOps" and "SRE" weren't as common until later in my career (earlier in history). Note that each title will likely include the tasks from any and all titles before/above:
- Tech Support: The person you call when the webserver is down
- Operations: knows when to restart the webserver (not likely to have access though)
- SysAdmin: restarts the webserver
- DevOps: writes a fancy script to restart all the webservers
- SRE: turns the fancy script into a service that restarts the webservers for you, which requires a webserver that someone has to restart at some point.
Happy Wednesday people!