SRE applies engineering rigor to operations and reliability. This guide explains what Site Reliability Engineering is and its core ideas.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) is a discipline, pioneered at Google, that applies software engineering practices to operations, using automation, service-level objectives and error budgets to run reliable systems at scale, while deliberately reducing manual, repetitive work known as toil.
SRE makes reliability measurable. A service-level objective (SLO) sets a target for reliability, and the gap between that target and 100 percent is the error budget, the amount of unreliability the team can spend. Error budgets turn reliability into an explicit, shared trade-off between shipping features and maintaining stability.
SRE treats manual, repetitive operational work, toil, as something to be engineered away. If a task is manual, repetitive and automatable, an SRE writes software to eliminate it. Reducing toil frees engineers for higher-value work and makes operations scale without linearly growing the team.
The logical extension of the war on toil is autonomous resolution: not just automating a known task, but having the system resolve repetitive incidents itself, under governance. This protects error budgets with fewer humans in the loop and lets SREs focus on the genuinely hard reliability problems.
Ops Singularity is the autonomous layer for SRE: it resolves the repetitive toil incidents that consume on-call time, through governed, validated Action Tickets, protecting error budgets with fewer humans in the loop. See the best SRE tools.
DevOps is a culture that unifies development and operations to deliver software reliably. SRE is a specific implementation of those principles, using engineering, SLOs and error budgets to run reliable systems, often described as SRE being a concrete way to do DevOps.
An error budget is the amount of unreliability a service can tolerate, the gap between its SLO target and 100 percent. It turns reliability into an explicit trade-off between shipping features and maintaining stability.
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