Main menu Main menu move to sidebar hide Navigation Main page Contents Current events Random article About Wikipedia Contact us Contribute Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file Special pages Search Search Appearance Donate Create account Log in Personal tools Donate Create account Log in Contents move to sidebar hide (Top) 1 History 2 Definition 3 Principles and practices 4 Deployment Toggle Deployment subsection 4.1 Kitchen Sink 4.2 Infrastructure 4.3 Tools 4.4 Product or Application 4.5 Embedded 4.6 Consulting 5 Industry 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links Toggle the table of contents Site reliability engineering 10 languages العربية Deutsch فارسی Français Bahasa Indonesia 日本語 Qaraqalpaqsha 한국어 Português 中文 Edit links Article Talk English Read Edit View history Tools Tools move to sidebar hide Actions Read Edit View history General What links here Related changes Upload file Permanent link Page information Cite this page Get shortened URL Print/export Download as PDF Printable version In other projects Wikidata item Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Use of software engineering practices for IT This article appears to contain a large number of buzzwords . Please help improve it by replacing such wording with clear, neutral , encyclopedic terms. ( May 2023 ) ( Learn how and when to remove this message ) Site reliability engineering ( SRE ) is a discipline in the field of software engineering and IT infrastructure support that monitors and improves the availability and performance of deployed software systems and large software services (which are expected to deliver reliable response times across events such as new software deployments, hardware failures, and cybersecurity attacks). [ 1 ] There is typically a focus on automation and an infrastructure as code methodology. SRE uses elements of software engineering, IT infrastructure, web development , and operations [ 2 ] to assist with reliability. It is similar to DevOps as they both aim to improve the reliability and availability of deployed software systems. History [ edit ] Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google with Benjamin Treynor Sloss, [ 3 ] [ 4 ] who founded SRE team in 2003. [ 5 ] The concept expanded within the software development industry, leading various companies to employ site reliability engineers . [ 6 ] By March 2016, Google had more than 1,000 site reliability engineers on staff. [ 7 ] Dedicated SRE teams are common at larger web development companies. [ 8 ] In middle-sized and smaller companies, DevOps teams sometimes perform SRE, as well. [ 6 ] Organizations that have adopted the concept include Airbnb , Dropbox , IBM , [ 9 ] LinkedIn , [ 10 ] Netflix , [ 7 ] and Wikimedia . [ 11 ] Definition [ edit ] Site reliability engineers (SREs) are responsible for a combination of system availability , latency , performance , efficiency, change management , monitoring , emergency response , and capacity planning . [ 12 ] SREs often have backgrounds in software engineering , systems engineering , and/or system administration . [ 13 ] The focuses of SRE include automation , system design , and improvements to system resilience . [ 13 ] SRE is considered a specific implementation of DevOps; [ 14 ] focusing specifically on building reliable systems, whereas DevOps covers a broader scope of operations. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ] Despite having different focuses, some companies have rebranded their operations teams to SRE teams. [ 6 ] Principles and practices [ edit ] Common definitions of the practices include (but are not limited to): [ 2 ] [ 18 ] Automation of repetitive tasks for cost-effectiveness. Defining reliability goals to prevent endless effort. Design of systems with a goal to reduce risks to availability, latency, and efficiency. Observability , the ability to ask arbitrary questions about a system without having to know ahead of time what to ask. Common definitions of the principles include (but are not limited to): Toil management, toil refers to manual, repetitive, automatable operational work. [ 19 ] Defining and measuring reliability goals— SLIs , SLOs , and error budgets. Non-Abstract Large Scale Systems Design (NALSD [ 20 ] ) with a focus on reliability. Designing for and implementing observability. Defining, testing, and running an incident management process. Capacity planning . Change and release management, including CI/CD . Chaos engineering . Deployment [ edit ] SRE teams collaborate with other departments within organizations to guide the implementation of the mentioned principles. Below is an overview of common practices: [ 21 ] Kitchen Sink [ edit ] Kitchen Sink [ 22 ] refers to the expansive and often unbounded scope of services and workflows that SRE teams oversee. Unlike traditional roles with clearly defined boundaries, SREs are tasked with various responsibilities, including system performance optimization, incident management, and automation. This approach allows SREs to address multiple challenges, ensuring that systems run efficiently and evolve in response to changing demands and complexities. Infrastructure [ edit ] Infrastructure SRE teams focus on maintaining and improving the reliability of systems that support other teams' workflows. While they sometimes collaborate with platform engineering teams, their primary responsibility is ensuring up-time, performance, and efficiency. Platform teams, on the other hand, primarily develop the software and systems used across the organization. While reliability is a goal for both, platform teams prioritize creating and maintaining the tools and services used by internal stakeholders, whereas Infrastructure SRE teams are tasked with ensuring those systems run smoothly and meet reliability standards. Tools [ edit ] SRE teams utilize a variety of tools with the aim of measuring, maintaining, and enhancing system reliability. These tools play a role in monitoring performance, identifying issues, and facilitating proactive maintenance. For instance, Nagios Core is commonly employed for system monitoring and alerting, while Prometheus (software) is frequently used for collecting and querying metrics in cloud-native environments. Product or Application [ edit ] SRE teams dedicated to specific products or applications are common in large organizations. [ 21 ] These teams are responsible for ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of key services. In larger companies, it's typical to have multiple SRE teams, each focusing on different products or applications, ensuring that each area receives specialized attention to meet performance and availability targets. Embedded [ edit ] In an embedded model, individual SREs or small SRE pairs are integrated within software engineering teams. These SREs collaborate with developers, applying core SRE principles—such as automation, monitoring, and incident response—directly to the software development lifecycle. This approach aims to enhance reliability, performance, and collaboration between SREs and developers. Consulting [ edit ] Consulting SRE teams specialize in advising organizations on the implementation of SRE principles and practices. Typically composed of seasoned SREs with a history across various implementations, these teams provide insights and guidance for specific organizational needs. When working directly with clients, these SREs are often referred to as 'Customer Reliability Engineers [ 23 ] .' In large organizations that have adopted SRE, a hybrid model is common [ citation needed ] . This model includes various implementations, such as multiple Product/Application SRE teams dedicated to addressing the specific reliability needs of different products. An Infrastructure SRE team may collaborate with a Platform engineering group to achieve shared reliability goals for a unified platform that supports all products and applications. Industry [ edit ] Since 2014, the USENIX organization has hosted the annual SREcon conference, bringing together site reliability engineers from various industries. This conference is a platform for professionals to share knowledge, explore effective practices, and discuss trends in site reliability engineering. [ 24 ] See also [ edit ] Chaos engineering Cloud computing Data center Disaster recovery High availability software Infrastructure as code Operations, administration and management Operations management Reliability engineering System administration Backup site References [ edit ] ^ "What is SRE? - Site Reliability Engineering Explained - AWS" . Amazon Web Services, Inc . Retrieved 2024-12-26 . ^ a b "Evaluating where your team lies on the SRE spectrum" . Google Cloud Blog . Retrieved 2021-06-26 . ^ Hill, Patrick. "Love DevOps? Wait until you meet SRE" . Atlassian . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ "What is SRE?" . Red Hat . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ Treynor, Ben (2014). "Keys to SRE" . USENIX SREcon14 . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ a b c Gossett, Stephen (June 1, 2020). "What Is a Site Reliability Engineer? What Does an SRE Do?" . Built In . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ a b Fischer, Donald (March 2, 2016). "Are site reliability engineers the next data scientists?" . TechCrunch . Archived from the original on August 12, 2019 . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ Beres, Cristi (October 9, 2024). "SRE & DevOps: Striking the Perfect IT Match" . Synergo Group . ^ "Site Reliability Engineering" . IBM Cloud Education . IBM . November 12, 2020 . Retrieved June 21, 2021 . ^ "Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)" . engineering.linkedin.com . Retrieved March 12, 2024 . ^ "SRE - Wikitech" . wikitech.wikimedia.org . Retrieved 2021-10-17 . ^ Treynor, Ben. "In Conversation" (Interview). Interviewed by Niall Murphy. Google Site Reliability Engineering. ^ a b Jones, Chris; Underwood, Todd; Nukala, Shylaja (June 2015). "Hiring Site Reliability Engineers" (PDF) . ;login: . Vol. 40, no. 3. pp.  35– 39. Archived (PDF) from the original on August 24, 2017 . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . ^ Dave Harrison (9 Oct 2018). "Interview with Betsy Beyer, Stephen Thorne of Google" . Retrieved 24 July 2024 . ^ Beyer, Betsy; Jones, Chris; Petoff, Jennifer; Murphy, Niall, eds. (2016). Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems . Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media . ISBN   978-1-4919-5118-7 . OCLC   945577030 . ^ Vargo, Seth; Fong-Jones, Liz (March 1, 2018). What's the Difference Between DevOps and SRE? (class SRE implements DevOps) (Video). Google . Archived from the original on December 3, 2019 . Retrieved March 8, 2018 . ^ "What is SRE? - SRE Explained - AWS" . Amazon Web Services, Inc . Retrieved 2022-11-05 . ^ "Google SRE Principles: SRE Operations and How SRE Teams Work" . sre.google . Retrieved 2026-06-28 . ^ "Google SRE - What is Toil in SRE: Understanding Its Impact" . sre.google . Retrieved 2026-06-26 . ^ "Google SRE - System Design: Non-Abstract Large System Design" . sre.google . Retrieved 2026-06-26 . ^ a b "SRE at Google: How to structure your SRE team" . Google Cloud Blog . Retrieved 2021-06-26 . ^ "SRE at Google: How to structure your SRE team" . Google Cloud Blog . Retrieved 2026-06-26 . ^ "Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering" . Google Cloud Blog . Retrieved 2026-06-26 . ^ "Usenix SREcon" . USENIX . 2021 . Retrieved June 17, 2021 . Further reading [ edit ] Limoncelli, Tom; Chalup, Strata R.; Hogan, Christina J. (September 2014). The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services . Vol. 2. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley . ISBN   978-0133478549 . OCLC   891786231 . Beyer, Betsy; Jones, Chris; Petoff, Jennifer; Murphy, Niall Richard, eds. (2016). Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems . O'Reilly . ISBN   978-1491929124 . Blank-Edelman, David N., ed. (2018). Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale (1 ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly. ISBN   978-1491978863 . OCLC   1052565720 . Beyer, Betsy; Murphy, Niall; Kawahara, Kent; Rensin, David; Thorne, Stephen (2018). The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE . O'Reilly. ISBN   978-1492029502 . Welch, Nat (2018). Real-World SRE: The Survival Guide for Responding to a System Outage and Maximizing Uptime . Packt . ISBN   978-1788628884 . Adkins, Heather; Beyer, Betsy; Blankinship, Paul; Lewandowski, Piotr; Oprea, Ana; Stubblefield, Adam (2020). Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems . O'Reilly. ISBN   978-1-4920-8312-2 . OCLC   1129470292 . Rosenthal, Casey; Jones, Nora (2020). Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice . O'Reilly. ISBN   978-1492043867 . External links [ edit ] Awesome Site Reliability Engineering resources list How they SRE resources list SRE Weekly weekly newsletter devoted to SRE SRE at Google landing page for learning more about SRE in Google v t e Software engineering Fields Computer programming DevOps Empirical software engineering Experimental software engineering Formal methods Requirements engineering Search-based software engineering Site reliability engineering Social software engineering Software deployment Software design Software maintenance Software testing Systems analysis Concepts Abstraction CI/CD Compatibility Backward compatibility Compatibility layer Compatibility mode Forward compatibility Software incompatibility Component-based software engineering Data modeling Enterprise architecture Functional specification Modeling language Programming paradigm Software Software archaeology Software architecture Software configuration management Software development process/methodology Software quality Software quality assurance Software system Software verification and validation Structured analysis Essential analysis Orientations Agile Aspect-oriented Object orientation Ontology SDLC Service orientation Models Developmental Agile EUP Executable UML Incremental model Iterative model Prototype model RAD Scrum Spiral model UP V-model Waterfall model XP Model-driven engineering Round-trip engineering Other CMMI Data model ER model Function model Information model Metamodeling Object model SPICE Systems model View model Languages IDEF SysML UML USL Related fields Computer engineering Computer science Information science Project management Risk management Systems engineering Category Commons Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Site_reliability_engineering&oldid=1361545052 " Categories : 2003 introductions Google Reliability engineering Software engineering Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description is different from Wikidata Wikipedia articles containing buzzwords from May 2023 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from October 2024 This page was last edited on 28 June 2026, at 16:26  (UTC) . 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