It’s challenging to maintain with the pace of technology and all the disciplines that come within information technology. Every year, more and more jobs pop up in the IT field that weren’t that five years ago.

IT is one of the fastest-growing job fields in the world and site reliability engineering falls into this category.

Initially, you may not be able to guess what site reliability engineering is except that its aim is to make things more, well, reliable.

Below, we’re going to run over the basics of what site reliability engineering is and what it can do for you and your business.

First things first, what is site reliability engineering?

It may come as no surprise that site reliability engineering, also known as SRE, was started by Google in the early 2000s.

Google needed people to make Google’s large-scale sites even more efficient and reliable and thus, the site reliability engineer was born. Even though the job started out at Google, it has expanded to other tech giants such as Amazon and Netflix.

This very focused job eventually became its own IT domain and now has a much more clear path than it did almost 20 years ago.

Nowadays, SREs are focused on developing automated solutions for on-call monitoring, capacity planning, and even disaster response. They work hand-in-hand with other key IT fields, such as development, software engineering, and operations.

So their focus is on what?

Overall, SREs are focusing on automation. After all, automation is the way that many businesses are looking to become more efficient and reliable.

If you can take an everyday task and automate it, then you’re going to be able to reallocate your budget, move personnel to more important tasks, and ultimately save your business money.

Google describes their job focus as the intent to “automate their way out a job”. By doing so, this will allow developers and other engineers to focus mainly on feature development and move onto other tasks.

If you think this is something your business needs, then you should look to contact a site reliability engineer as soon as possible.

I don’t really deal with tech, can they still help me?

While it may seem like SREs are only meant to work with tech companies, that doesn’t mean they can’t branch away from computers and software to help another company.

Even if you don’t feel like you’re heavily dependent on software, you’d be hard-pressed to find any company in the world that isn’t using some kind of software.

By looking through a recent job board, you’ll find everything on there from airlines to food delivery companies to even research labs that are looking for site reliability engineers.

Is there growth expected?

The answer to this question is pretty easy. Yes, there is expected growth with all site reliability engineering and while you may not think that you need to invest in such services now, that could very well change in the future.

As more and more companies turn to tech to further their businesses, there will be more and more of a need to make those processes as easy and automated as possible.

Every business is looking to be more efficient and site reliability engineers can certainly help you improve your everyday functions and overall efficiency.