Why Businesses Are willing to Pay for Cloud Engineers, SREs, and DevOps Services

May 26, 2024

Have you ever wondered why companies are looking for SRE, DevOps, and Cloud Engineer roles, and why there's so much demand for them? When you look at the job descriptions, you see technology names like Kubernetes, AWS, and Terraform. And you're not sure what value these people bring to the companies. If someone was paying them just to write code like this the world would be great and easy, right?

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: awesome-app-deployment
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: awesome-app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: awesome-app
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: awesome-app
        image: awesome-app-image
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080

I had the same question at the beginning of my career, and I want to give you the answer to have a clear vision and understand why you're doing what you're doing from the start. You should have a clear goal that benefits you, the companies, and the clients you work with. I want you to finish this post with a different perspective on these jobs, whether you already work in them or are considering them. Let's go!

Imagine you have a shop where you sell socks, and you decide to expand your business and sell your products online. You have a good budget and decide to invest in a website where your clients can buy online and a mobile application too. You have a dev team working on these online services. You launch the website and application, people start using them, profits are coming in, and everyone is happy. Life is good!

Day by day, your store becomes more known, your clients increase every day, and they demand new features in your application, like tracking shipping, using coupon codes, and more socks sold—stay with me in your imagination.

Your staff and devs are doing their job perfectly, but problems start to appear.

  • Clients begin complaining that sometimes your website goes down ☠️.
  • Some say their orders get lost or they encounter errors when trying to buy from you 🐞.
  • Others complain about the slowness of your application 🐢.
  • The problems don’t stop there. Your hosting company sends you a larger bill than before. Your website code grows and becomes more complex, making it difficult to update. The frequency of updates decreases, and each update creates new problems. Updates have become a nightmare.
  • Hacker news constantly reports breaches and cyber threats, and you’re afraid of attacks on your services.
  • The final blow is new competitors entering the market with better features and shopping experiences, and your clients are decreasing every day. Where did they go? Who knows.

The reality here is that every action has a reaction. Every situation your business goes through has a positive or negative impact. Performance issues and bugs cause clients to lose trust in your product. Every time your website goes down, clients look for alternatives, and your competitors are ready to take them. If your brand image gets tarnished, no one wants their credit card info leaked on the dark web.

If you don’t act quickly, the movie will end! Anyone in your position would think this is too much, why deal with all this hassle, better to shut down and go local. Life was good back then, the money was coming in, although less, but life was simpler, and the headache was minimal. But you’re determined, there’s no going back, you tell your devs to hold on.

You start researching to find a way to solve the tech issues you’re facing. You find many companies that went through the same situation and overcame it. Many of them underwent a successful digital transformation. The more you research, you find that most of them have profiles like SREs, Cloud Engineers, DevOps, or whatever people call them nowadays, working with modern methodologies different from what you’re using.

You think, “Wow, what did I miss, are these people ahead of me?” Let’s try this path and see where it leads. Time to play the last card, it can’t get worse than this.

You start recruiting your dream team. Capable folks with experience in these situations begin identifying the root causes of your problems and start solving them one by one.

  • To solve these issues, first, they enhance observability. They set up a monitoring system that helps them identify where the problems are coming from in your services. They monitor error rates, latency, resources in use, logs, and traces, allowing them to see the system's operations like an eagle. This helps reduce errors and downtime in your applications.
  • With the data collected from your system, they can pinpoint where resources are wasted and reduce them. They also find ways to optimize costs in the future, easing those frightening bills.
  • They implement a CI/CD process that simplifies tasks for the devs, automating repetitive tasks like building, testing, and deploying every time the code changes. This shortens the feedback loop and encourages experimentation with new features. This speeds up time to market, increases creativity, and lets devs try new technologies and ideas, keeping you ahead of competitors and resolving issues faster as they arise.
  • They harden your system by implementing best security practices. CI/CD helps them patch the system as soon as vulnerabilities are discovered.
  • They leverage the power of the cloud, making your system elastic, able to scale up and down on demand. This ensures reliability and resilience during high sales periods like Black Friday—no more downtime!
  • They set goals and KPIs for the system, such as SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, allowing them to track the availability and latency of the application. This provides a better shopping experience for your users.

Users keep coming back, surpassing your competitors every day, offering a pleasant shopping experience. Sales increase, customers are happy with the socks you sell, and the team is unstoppable.

The movie ends here. I hope I’ve delivered what I promised at the beginning of this post. Please share your thoughts with me and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell notification button! Just kidding.

abdelouahab mbarki