Site reliability engineering applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations, ensuring systems remain available, performant, and scalable. SRE practices balance innovation velocity with system stability through data-driven decision-making.

Core Principles

• Service Level Objectives: Define measurable reliability targets based on user impact.

• Error Budgets: Quantify acceptable downtime to balance reliability and development speed.

• Toil Reduction: Automate repetitive operational work to focus on engineering.

• Monitoring and Alerting: Track system health and alert only on actionable issues.

• Incident Management: Systematic response, resolution, and learning from outages.

Key Practices

Teams implement comprehensive monitoring, conduct blameless postmortems after incidents, gradually rollout changes with safety mechanisms, maintain detailed runbooks for operations, perform chaos engineering to test resilience, and use capacity planning for growth.

Organizational Impact

SRE teams improve system reliability by 99.9%+ uptime, reduce incident response time through automation, enable faster feature delivery with error budgets, decrease operational toil by 50-70%, and foster collaboration between development and operations.

Tools and Methodologies

Modern SRE relies on observability platforms, incident management systems, infrastructure-as-code tools, chaos engineering frameworks, and continuous delivery pipelines for automated deployment and rollback capabilities.