A site reliability engineer (SRE) applies software engineering to operations, keeping production systems available, fast and recoverable. Organisations hire SREs when outages, slow responses or on-call fatigue start hurting customers and teams.
A DevOps engineer builds and maintains the pipelines, infrastructure and automation that let software teams ship to production quickly and safely. Companies usually hire one when releases have become slow, manual or risky.
Observability is the ability to understand what a running system is doing, and why, from the data it emits. That data is mainly logs, metrics and traces, which let engineers answer new questions without shipping new code.
A service level objective (SLO) is an internal reliability target for a service, such as the share of requests that must succeed quickly. It defines what good enough looks like for users over a rolling window.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an approach to running production systems that applies software engineering to operations. It sets measurable reliability targets and replaces repetitive manual work with automation.
DevOps is a broad way of working that joins development and operations; SRE is one concrete way to run production, using SLOs and error budgets. Many teams use both, with SRE practices sitting inside a wider DevOps culture.
An on-call rotation is a schedule that assigns engineers, in turn, to respond to production alerts and incidents outside or during normal hours. Someone is always available to restore service.
A clear proven process, that delivers
You've seen our ideas - now go deeper.
Discover more insights, guides, and engineering practice.