Over the past 20 years, most leading businesses have adopted cloud computing and distributed systems to develop their applications. An unintended consequence: Traditional IT operations (ITOps) often struggle to handle the complexities of increased workloads and cloud technologies.

As distributed systems scale, keeping operations and development separate ultimately leads to stagnation. Developers might want to push out new applications or updates, while the operations team, already overwhelmed with keeping tabs on the existing infrastructure, might push back on any risks to the infrastructure.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline that offers a more nuanced approach by combining software engineering principles with operational practices that ensure service reliability and optimal performance at scale. The people in this role are site reliability engineers (SREs), simplifying and automating tasks that the operations team would perform manually. Less time spent on tedious, repetitive work opens the door for innovation and business growth.

Site reliability engineering has become an essential component of a modern organization. The benefits include saying goodbye to reactive problem-solving and hello to predictable performance, proactive system design, improved scalability, minimized service disruptions, and new opportunities for improvement.

Want to know more about the SRE role and the world of site reliability engineering? Let’s start with the basics.

Key practices in site reliability engineering

When running services, SRE teams focus on key everyday activities such as monitoring and observability, incident management, capacity planning, and change management.

Sources1. Google, “Google SRE Book,” 2017.

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