Is working with kubernetes a devops or swe job?

Aug 1, 2020 3 Comments

I see several infrastructure teams in companies working on projects to allow the whole company to use kubernetes.

My question is, is this more of a SWE role or a devops/SRE role? I generally feel like managing kubernetes is for devops/SRE, and I’m worried that going down this path would make my future roles lean more heavily towards devops and SRE.

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TOP 3 Comments
  • First of all, there are no DevOps roles. DevOps is a methodology and not a job role. Second, the engineers you’re describing do in fact both typical SWE responsibility as well as on-call, production readiness, debugging outages, postmortems etc.

    A SRE at Google and other companies not only needs to pass the regular SWE bar but also have in-depth knowledge on Linux, networking, etc.

    If you work on Kubernetes infra, it’s likely you’ll have to do a lot of custom stuff like controllers, automation, etc. so there’s still a fair share of SWE work to be done
    Aug 1, 2020 2
    • Box
      k1ndnes$

      Go to company page Box

      k1ndnes$
      SRE is very different beast depending on company or even team. SRE at my company is 90% ops. No SWE type work. Also seen it entirely SWE type work.
      Aug 1, 2020
    • I agree that companies don’t have the same understanding of the SRE profession which is why I specifically called out Google who created the field and has a clear view on what it entails. At my company we do have separate cloud infrastructure engineers and SRE but our Kubernetes teams seems to follow the google model
      Aug 1, 2020