Ask HN: How many SREs do real SRE work?
The reason I am asking this is, cause,
One, I work as an SRE. In fact as an Lead SRE for one of the largest startup of India ($10B+ evaluation). And have been working as an SRE since last 7 years. Before that I was a Linux Admin with awesome bash scripting skills for around 8 years, and before that a Network Technician (and somewhat of a Network admin) for around 5 years.
And two, if I am to go with the Google SRE book's principles to evaluate myself, I have done little SRE work and more of Linux Administration or Operations work. I did automate things, but 80% of it was using bash, and the remaining with python script, with many of those python scripts calling bash commands in the end. My automation spanned automatically replacing bad Kafka Brokers, Hadoop DataNodes, doing automatic MySQL Master switch in 5.6 version of MySQL, and similar things for Redis and Zookeeper.
I also wrote code to test 2 very large distributed services. 1. Ingesting PB scale data every day, a Log Aggregation Service and 2. again ingesting PB scale of data every day, a message broker service, end to end, by throwing multiple log line at the service to its ingestion endpoint regularly and then seeing whether can I see it at the querying end, measuring various metrics in the process and raising alerts for any thing which looked off.
What I want to ask is to all SREs out there, can you give examples of real SRE work that you have done? I know I may be comparing myself to others, but I want to know how many SREs are doing SRE work? Am I at the wrong end of the title? Is it Okay to have a large proportion of your work being standard operations? Or is it that only few companies implement strict SRE automation kind of work.
Note: I understand that company culture matters too, and in the company I work in its not that enforced, but I always lived by own principles and worked as per my own standards, and am sure if I were to do a good work, no one would oppose me.