Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have a special set of skills and are in high demand. When the role was first introduced, it was a “behind the scenes” IT group that ran a specific service at massive scale for a public cloud provider. For enterprises that have SREs, finding, retaining, and efficiently utilizing their time is critical. The Red Hat SRE mission is: “Our team works side-by-side with customers, partners, and the leading cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft to ensure your Red Hat OpenShift clusters are operating efficiently and at scale.”

In the latest episode of Red Hat’s livestreaming show, In The Clouds, Candace Sheremeta and Christoph Blecker shared their career journey to becoming SREs and what differentiates the role at Red Hat versus other companies. They spoke about the software development work and how they manage work to scale projects and products, not engineering teams.

The SRE team gains a network effect across clouds by managing services that run on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Customers can also learn directly from the Red Hat SRE team. One of the top tips that Christophe mentioned: Enterprises should avoid building snowflakes – custom built solutions that solve a single problem.

Instead, by leveraging cloud services where the Red Hat SREs manage the infrastructure, customers can spend more time and resources focused on building or modernizing applications, securing their environment, and other differentiated business requirements. Candace talked about the direct conversations that the SRE team has with customers, in order to understand their requirements and deliver enhancements over time that benefit all.

For more insights from Candace and Christophe, watch the new episode :