DevOps Engineering — Delivery Mentality

• Focus: Speed + reliability of change

• Strength: CI/CD, pipelines, collaboration between dev and ops

• Approach:

  • Automate builds, tests, deployments

  • Reduce friction between teams

• Question asked:

  “How do we ship changes safely and faster?”

Site Reliability Engineering — Reliability-by-Design Mentality

• Focus: System behavior over time

• Strength: Monitoring, automation, self-healing systems

• Approach:

  • Encode operational knowledge into code

  • Measure, detect, and react automatically

  • Minimize toil

• Question asked:

  “How do we make the system fix itself and page humans only for the unknown?”

1. Overview

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations. The goal is to create reliable, scalable, and automated systems by encoding operational knowledge into software.

Systems Administration — Operational Mentality

• Focus: Keeping systems running

• Strength: Deep understanding of OS, networking, services, and failure modes

• Approach:

  • Manual intervention

  • Scripts and cron jobs

  • Human-driven detection and recovery

• Question asked:

  “How do I fix this when it breaks?”

1. Introduction / Purpose

This documentation provides comprehensive guidance for managing cloud infrastructure, Linux servers, and Windows Server environments.

It is intended for IT staff, and Systems Administrators alike.

2. Environment Overview

Systems and IT infrastructure generally operate under three primary environments: Development, Testing (Staging), and Production. Each environment serves a specific role in the system lifecycle and must be managed not only for functionality, but also for cost efficiency, security, and operational stability.