EP52: DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering

This week’s system design refresher:

• Backend Burger for Developers (Youtube video)

• DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering

• HTTP status codes

• Components of a URL

• What makes a good error message?

• Job openings

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The Most Beloved Backend Burger for Developers

Everyone loves burgers, whether it's a full stack burger, a frontend burger, or a backend burger.

While the origin of this innovative burger is unknown, a comparable full-stack burger was shared on Reddit four years ago. We want to give a special shout-out to the original creators.

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DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering. What is the difference?

The concepts of DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering have emerged at different times and have been developed by various individuals and organizations.

By guest author Xiong Wang

DevOps as a concept was introduced in 2009 by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer at the Agile conference. They sought to bridge the gap between software development and operations by promoting a collaborative culture and shared responsibility for the entire software development lifecycle.

SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, was pioneered by Google in the early 2000s to address operational challenges in managing large-scale, complex systems. Google developed SRE practices and tools, such as the Borg cluster management system and the Monarch monitoring system, to improve the reliability and efficiency of their services.

Platform Engineering is a more recent concept, building on the foundation of SRE engineering. The precise origins of Platform Engineering are less clear, but it is generally understood to be an extension of the DevOps and SRE practices, with a focus on delivering a comprehensive platform for product development that supports the entire business perspective.

It's worth noting that while these concepts emerged at different times. They are all related to the broader trend of improving collaboration, automation, and efficiency in software development and operations.

Over to you: Which topics would you like us to address in our next discussion?

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Which HTTP status codes are most common?

The response codes for HTTP are divided into five categories:

Informational (100-199)
Success (200-299)
Redirection (300-399)
Client Error (400-499)
Server Error (500-599)

These codes are defined in RFC 9110. To save you from reading the entire document (which is about 200 pages), here is a summary of the most common ones:

Over to you: HTTP status code 401 is for Unauthorized. Can you explain the difference between authentication and authorization, and which one does code 401 check for?

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Do you know all the components of a URL?

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a term familiar to most people, as it is used to locate resources on the internet. When you type a URL into a web browser's address bar, you are accessing a "resource", not just a webpage.

URLs comprise several components:

• The protocol or scheme, such as http, https, and ftp.

• The domain name and port, separated by a period (.)

• The path to the resource, separated by a slash (/)

• The parameters, which start with a question mark (?) and consist of key-value pairs, such as a=b&c=d.

• The fragment or anchor, indicated by a pound sign (#), which is used to bookmark a specific section of the resource.

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What makes a good error message?

"When life gives you lemons, write better error messages" by Jenni Nadler.

I hope everyone writes better messages :) It makes everyone's life so much easier. The link to the original article is here.

Over to you - what's the best and worst error message you've seen?

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