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Jess Lee Subscriber for The DEV Team

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DevDiscuss S2E8: What You Need to Know About Site Reliability (Season Finale!)

In the finale episode of DevDiscuss Season 2, we chat about site reliability engineering and the highs, lows, and nuances of this interdisciplinary role.

As you'll hear, there are many definitions of site reliability engineering but generally, SREs act as a bridge between the software development and operations teams and use the principals of engineering with system administration. They eliminate the struggle and toil of other developers while ensuring systems and sites provide reliable experiences. In other words, SREs are crucial.

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@ben and I were joined by two guests for this episode:

  • Logan McDonald Senior Site Reliability Engineer at BuzzFeed on the core infrastructure team
  • Molly Struve Lead Site Reliability Engineer here at Forem.

In this episode, Ben, Logan, Molly, and I discuss

  • The different experiences of SREs on small and large teams
  • A few ways that teams and organizations can help make their SREs lives easier
  • SRE horror stories 😱

... and more!

Here's Molly's TL;DR of site reliability engineering in GIF-form:

SRE-as-a-GIF
Source: Describe Your Job With a GIF!

— But you should listen to S2E8 of DevDiscuss to get the full story!

If you enjoy it, please consider leaving us a review on the podcast platform of your choice. We’ll mail you a FREE pack of DEV stickers if you send us a screenshot of your review! All you have to do is fill out this form 🦄⚡🎨


Quick Listening Links


Huge thanks to @levisharpe for producing & mixing the show, and @peter and @saronyitbarek for their editorial oversight.

_Thank you to our Season 2 sponsors who help make this show possible. If you're in the market for any of their services, please check out

Thank you for following DevDiscuss this season! We'll be back with more episodes soon! ❤️

Top comments (4)

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ender_minyard profile image
ender minyard • Edited

This episode is great :-)

I've been reading the original SRE book so this episode showed up just in time! I wish there was a path for sort of...managing site reliability in the beginning? SRE for small projects?

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graciegregory profile image
Gracie Gregory (she/her)

Great episode! I learned a ton and vow to never send vague error screenshots to my friendly neighborhood SRE i.e. @molly_struve

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binaryshrey profile image
Shreyansh Saurabh

Another amazing episode!
Learned a ton of interesting stuff!

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chethanagopinath profile image
Chethana Gopinath

Really cool podcast!! Started following on Spotify and waiting for more! :))