Thanks to Site Reliability Engineering, Snowflake continues to provide seamless customer experience amid its rapid growth. So how does Site Reliability Engineering build and maintain scalable and efficient services.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines the best software engineering and operations experience. SREs are the guardians of reliability, availability, scalability, and performance of highly distributed systems. They bridge the gap between development and operations by using software engineering principles.

SREs are responsible for managing mission-critical aspects of our infrastructure and driving innovation. This includes, but is not limited to, designing and implementing a highly scalable container runtime environment, cross-service discovery and authentication, all aspects of traffic management, and also running critical services like the FoundationDB database.

A typical day of an SRE consists of system monitoring, observability engineering, incident response, capacity planning, performance optimization, and continuous improvement process which aims to automate us from this type of work 🙂. SREs also help developers in designing and running their services at scale.

Snowflake has recently announced Unistore - a single database service for both transactional and analytical processing. The unique value of Unistore is that companies don't have to run two separate databases anymore. It is SRE’s role to prepare Snowflake services for 10-100x more workload. All it takes is to scale FoundationDB to run hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, processing endless billions of transactions each day. And fix things, if they break!

We hope this deeper insight into the SRE team and knowledge of all its possibilities excites you. Join us in the Warsaw office and together let's find a way to automate the world 🙂