What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

Site Reliability Engineering is how modern teams keep systems available, performant, and resilient—without slowing innovation. Born at Google, SRE blends software engineering with IT operations to make sure services don’t just launch—they last.

At its core, SRE treats reliability as a feature. It brings code-driven discipline to the messy work of keeping things running.

Why SRE matters

Every second of downtime hurts—customers lose access, teams scramble, reputations take a hit.

SRE helps you:

• Automate your way out of manual fixes
• Set measurable goals for service reliability
• Balance speed with control
• Spot and fix issues before they reach users

It’s how high-performing teams deliver with confidence—even at scale.

How SRE works

SRE uses a few core practices to keep services steady:

• Error budgets: Define how much failure is acceptable—then let that guide how fast you move
• Monitoring and observability: Get real-time signals from your systems, not just static alerts
• Automation: Replace human toil with scripts, policies, and logic
• Blameless postmortems: Focus on what broke and why—not who’s at fault

It’s not about chasing perfection. It’s about managing risk, fast.

SRE in Action

Say you’re launching a new app feature. SRE practices let you ship it with guardrails:

• If performance drops, automated rollbacks kick in
• If error rates spike, alerts trigger before users even notice
• If something fails, the team learns from it without blame

SRE doesn’t slow things down—it keeps change safe.

Best practices for Site Reliability Engineering

To get the most from SRE:

• Start with strong Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Automate deployments, alerts, and rollbacks
• Monitor the right signals—latency, errors, saturation
• Track error budgets to know when to pause or push forward

SRE isn’t one tool—it’s a framework for building reliability into everything.

The bottom line

If reliability is part of your promise, Site Reliability Engineering should be part of your strategy. It helps you build systems that hold up under pressure—and recover fast when they don’t.

Related Resources:

How Delinea engineered the Saas Platform for near-perfect uptime.