Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

What happens when you give a software engineer an ops pager. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is Google’s answer to the question “what if we treated operations as a software problem?”

SREs write code to automate operations, define SLOs to measure reliability, and use error budgets to balance feature velocity with stability. The core philosophy: if a human is doing it repeatedly, automate it. If you can’t automate it, at least make it less painful.

Why it matters: SRE brought engineering rigor to operations. It’s not just “ops with a fancier title” — it’s a fundamentally different approach to running systems at scale.