Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) may sound like a fancy job title, but it’s actually one of the most practical and important roles in modern infrastructure and software teams.
What is an SRE?
SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineer. In simple terms, an SRE ensures that systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. The concept was born at Google, where software engineers were tasked with running production systems using software engineering principles.
How is SRE different from DevOps?
People often confuse SRE and DevOps — and that’s understandable. Both aim to bridge the gap between development and operations, but they take slightly different approaches:
| SRE | DevOps |
|---|---|
| Focuses on reliability | Focuses on collaboration |
| Emphasizes SLIs, SLOs, SLAs | Emphasizes automation & culture |
| Engineering approach to ops | Collaborative philosophy |
Core Responsibilities
Monitoring & Alerting
Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager are bread and butter.Incident Response
Responding to outages and preventing them from repeating.Capacity Planning
Ensuring your system can handle future load.Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
Defining and measuring what “reliable” means.
Why SRE matters
Without someone focused on reliability, fast releases can lead to fragile systems. SREs help maintain a healthy balance between velocity and stability.
Want to become one?
Start by learning:
- Linux fundamentals
- Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Kubernetes & cloud platforms
- Incident management processes
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