SREteams

SRE teams are groups of engineers who apply software engineering to operations problems. Their mission is to create scalable, highly available systems while reducing the workload associated with operating them. SRE teams focus on reliability, latency, capacity planning, incident response, and change management, often using automation to minimize manual toil.

The concept originated at Google in the early 2000s, when developers adopted software engineering techniques to operations. Since then, many organizations have adopted SRE practices, adapting the model to their size and domain. SREs work at the intersection of development and operations and may be structured as centralized reliability teams or embedded within product teams.

Core practices include defining service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs) to measure performance; maintaining error budgets that balance reliability with feature velocity; and conducting blameless postmortems to identify root causes without assigning fault. SREs strive to reduce toil by automating repetitive tasks and building reliable tooling, dashboards, and runbooks. They also run on-call rotations to ensure rapid incident response and recovery.

Organizational models vary: some teams are dedicated to a service, others are platform-focused, and many are embedded in product groups. Collaboration with software engineers, security teams, and product management is common to align reliability goals with product priorities.

Outcomes typically include improved availability and faster incident recovery, clearer decision-making around risk, and a more sustainable operating pace. Challenges include maintaining balance between reliability and innovation, avoiding bureaucratic rigidity, and ensuring a healthy blameless culture.