SRE

Definitions

1. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline, originated at Google, that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations. SRE teams write code to automate operational tasks like deployments, scaling, monitoring, and incident response rather than performing them manually. Key concepts include service-level objectives (SLOs) that define reliability targets, error budgets that balance feature velocity against stability, and blameless postmortems focused on systemic improvements. SREs manage on-call rotations, build internal tooling, and reduce toil (repetitive manual work). The discipline bridges development teams who want to ship fast and operations teams who want stability, treating reliability as a feature requiring engineering investment.

   In plain English: Engineers who make sure websites and services stay running reliably — using software engineering techniques to solve operations problems.

Related Terms

• Terraform
• Observability
• Toil
• DevOps
• Horizontal Scaling
• Vertical Scaling
• On-Call
• Chaos Engineering
• GitOps
• Burnout
• infrastructure as code
• distributed tracing
• toil
• flame graph
• Health Check
• Chaos Testing
• Log Rotation
• Packet Loss
• Production Incident
• On-Call Culture
• Chaos Monkey Culture
• Service Level