Why Every SRE Should Learn a Little Rust

#sre #devops #rust #programming

I'm not saying rewrite your stack in Rust. I'm saying: learn enough to read it.

Here's why, from someone who dragged their feet for years and finally gave in.

Rust is showing up everywhere in infra

Observability: Vector, OpenTelemetry collector components, Tempo, Loki's ingesters in some paths
Proxies: Linkerd's data plane, parts of Istio's future, newer eBPF-based tools
Databases: TiKV, SurrealDB, and bits of Postgres extensions
CLIs: Half the infra tools you install now are Rust binaries

If your stack has observability or networking components, you're going to be reading Rust code in an incident sooner or later. Better to be able to follow along.

You don't need to be fluent

You need to:

Read Rust well enough to follow a function call
Understand what ownership and borrowing mean (you won't debug them, but you need to read the code)
Compile a small program
Read a panic stack trace

That's enough. That's maybe 2 weekends of work.

The side benefit

Rust teaches you to think about state, concurrency, and error handling more carefully. Those skills show up in whatever language you actually write in. I write less broken Python and Go after learning Rust, even though I rarely write Rust.