> I also don't believe software engineering principles will help you reduce operational complexity.
This isn't a goal of SRE, in my opinion nor in anything I can recall reading. The goal of applying software engineering principles is to accept the increased complexity in exchange for a reduced operational burden.
There's layers of that effect, and the right one depends on largely on your operational burden. Sysadmins shun complexity, so systems are simple but doing mass updates requires a lot of manpower. DevOps embraces some complexity like Ansible or manually orchestrated containers making it easier to do mass updates, but still a burden. SRE embraces complexity, in exchange for a dramatic reduction in manual effort on many tasks.
The idea is that at certain scales (or reliability requirements), it becomes cheaper to hire a small number of expensive people that can manage complex systems than it is to hire a large number of people each managing a simple system.
Software engineering arises because it can effectively trade complexity for reduced operational burdens in exactly the areas you want. You don't have to migrate to a new infrastructure orchestration tool, you can just write an orchestration tool on top of what's there (which I've actually seen done). Was it perfect? No. Was it cheaper than migrating a half million containers to Kubernetes? Yes.
Operations management tends to be very inflexible. They have a set of tools, and anything outside those tools is either a no go or will require replacing an old tool at the cost of months of effort.
This isn't a goal of SRE, in my opinion nor in anything I can recall reading. The goal of applying software engineering principles is to accept the increased complexity in exchange for a reduced operational burden.
There's layers of that effect, and the right one depends on largely on your operational burden. Sysadmins shun complexity, so systems are simple but doing mass updates requires a lot of manpower. DevOps embraces some complexity like Ansible or manually orchestrated containers making it easier to do mass updates, but still a burden. SRE embraces complexity, in exchange for a dramatic reduction in manual effort on many tasks.
The idea is that at certain scales (or reliability requirements), it becomes cheaper to hire a small number of expensive people that can manage complex systems than it is to hire a large number of people each managing a simple system.
Software engineering arises because it can effectively trade complexity for reduced operational burdens in exactly the areas you want. You don't have to migrate to a new infrastructure orchestration tool, you can just write an orchestration tool on top of what's there (which I've actually seen done). Was it perfect? No. Was it cheaper than migrating a half million containers to Kubernetes? Yes.
Operations management tends to be very inflexible. They have a set of tools, and anything outside those tools is either a no go or will require replacing an old tool at the cost of months of effort.