What is SRE? Principles and practices explained

• SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) helps reduce the typical issues Dev and Ops teams face during releases.

• SRE improves reliability, accountability, and innovation by helping applications stay stable through every update.

• Measurement, response, learning, and improvement are the four major components that make SRE work.

• Effective SRE starts at the leadership level, but it also depends on strong team structure and shared responsibility for reliability.

• JSM can help you simplify incident response and implement SRE effectively.

Developing and releasing software involves a lot of moving parts, and coordinating launches across teams can be challenging. Innovations like site reliability engineering (SRE) help reduce friction, enabling teams to streamline ITSM.

SRE plays a vital role in modern software development, helping reduce the time to launch while minimizing roadblocks and reliability issues. Learn more about SRE core principles and pillars and how SRE can impact your organization.

What is site reliability engineering (SRE)?

SRE is an engineering discipline that applies software engineering practices to operational work in order to build and maintain reliable, scalable systems. It focuses on improving system performance through automation, measurable reliability targets, and continuous operational improvement.

Ben Treynor, one of the early leaders behind Google’s SRE practice, has described site reliability engineering as what happens “when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations.”

Historically, development teams focused on delivering new features quickly, while operations teams prioritized system stability. This tension often created friction around release decisions and risk tolerance.

SRE introduced a more structured approach by defining reliability targets and using measurable thresholds to guide when changes can be safely released. Dedicated reliability engineers help ensure systems meet performance expectations while enabling continuous innovation.

As Google SRE Andrew Widdowson has noted, the work can resemble “being part of an intense pit crew,” continuously improving systems while they remain in production.

SRE vs traditional IT operations vs DevOps

In traditional IT operations, the primary focus is on minimizing issues with new releases and the risks they pose. Teams are structured based on IT expertise, with network engineers handling the network and so on. While this model is effective in terms of maximizing reliability, it can create bottlenecks and delays.

DevOps was created as a modern solution to the challenges traditional IT operations teams face. Unlike traditional IT operations, DevOps focuses on agility and efficiency through automation. DevOps teams are also cross-functional, which gives them more flexibility.

SRE is the latest innovation that aims to connect Dev and Ops teams. SRE streamlines collaboration between Dev and Ops teams through observability, automation, and application monitoring. SRE teams measure application performance against Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), or Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to ensure reliability. SRE team members can also identify and fix code issues, so coding is a key skill for SRE teams.

How does SRE work? 

There are several core pillars of SRE that streamline DevOps and help ensure software reliability. Taking a closer look at the key aspects of SRE can help you effectively integrate SRE into your organization.

Measurement: Defining and tracking reliability

Measurement is the foundation of SRE decision-making, providing key data that SRE teams use to maximize reliability with each launch. Key metrics include:

• Service level indicators (SLIs): SLIs like latency, availability, throughput, and error rates are key metrics for measuring system reliability. 

• Service level objectives (SLOs): SLOs allow teams to set realistic reliability targets based on user experience, which also helps balance performance goals with operational constraints to ensure software is reliable upon release.

• Service level agreements (SLAs): SLAs are external reliability commitments that typically aren’t as tight as SLOs. SLOs are stricter than SLAs because they serve as a warning system for potential performance issues, ensuring accountability to customers and delivering the best customer experience.

• Error budgets: Error budgets are the allowable downtime you can have in a period. Teams use error budgets to pace development. When the error budget is depleted, development slows down. When the budget is healthy, you can speed up development and take more risks.

Response: Managing incidents and operational load

Response is the structured way SRE teams manage reliability issues in real time. Teams use defined processes and standardized frameworks to streamline incident management: 

• Incident response practices: Teams create defined processes, roles, and escalation paths to ensure timely and consistent incident response. Jira Service Management (JSM) allows teams to easily manage issues, escalate them, and share best practices and procedures in a centralized location.

• Severity levels and prioritization: Teams use standardized severity frameworks to quickly assess the impact and determine how urgent a particular issue is. This helps teams prioritize incidents based on severity.

• On-call engineering: Sustainable on-call rotations help strike a balance between system responsiveness and developer productivity and wellbeing, reducing burnout and helping you achieve better results.

Learning: Turning incidents into systemic improvement

Once incident response is complete, learning is the mechanism that helps teams prevent recurring failures and improve system resilience.

• Blameless postmortems: When teams focus on systemic causes of issues instead of individual mistakes, it results in more effective problem-solving and supports the psychological safety of the team.

• Postmortem templates and practices: Using structured incident reviews creates better documentation and drives actionable follow-ups. The postmortem template in JSM streamlines this process.

• Reliability knowledge sharing: Centralized pages and documentation allow teams to build a knowledge base and scale learning across services and organizations.

Improvement: Engineering reliability at scale

Improvement is the long-term outcome of mature SRE practices. These are the changes that can scale with your business and ensure long-term reliability.

• Toil reduction: Identifying and eliminating repetitive operational workflows frees up time that teams can use to focus on more high-value engineering efforts, so you’re not wasting valuable resources.

• Automation and standardization: Automation improves system consistency, resilience, and operational efficiency by streamlining operational workflows and reducing the risk of human error.

• Capacity planning and performance optimization: Taking a preventative approach to designing your system can protect against common issues and support sustainable growth, ensuring systems easily scale with your growth.

How to run SRE effectively

SRE can be an effective tool when used properly. Following the proper procedures and best practices makes it easier to effectively implement SRE.

Making reliability a shared responsibility

Making reliability a shared responsibility is one of SRE's core principles. When development and operations teams share responsibility for the outcome of a release, teams are more likely to work together productively to find a solution to the problem at hand.

Tools like error budgets play a key role in aligning priorities and encouraging collaboration. SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs are simple ways to objectively measure system performance, providing teams with a solid foundation to work with.

Choosing the right team structure

SRE teams can be structured as a centralized or embedded team, and both models have their advantages.

Embedded SRE teams work within product teams, giving them a better understanding of the product and allowing for rapid response times. Centralized SRE teams are separate teams that work across the organization.

Hybrid teams are an effective compromise between centralized and embedded SRE teams, combining the agility of embedded SRE teams with the consistency of centralized teams. Hybrid engineering roles help deliver more reliable systems by accelerating development and reducing reliability issues.

Building leadership support for reliability

Making reliability a long-term priority and embedding it into the strategic decision-making process isn’t as simple as creating an SRE team. Effective, long-term SRE starts with leadership.

When leadership is committed to improving reliability, SRE teams have access to the resources they need to ensure reliability. Leadership buy-in also supports a cultural shift that prioritizes reliability over rapid releases, which helps weave SRE into everything an organization does.

When should you adopt SRE?

If you’re considering adopting SRE, here are some signs your organization is ready to make the switch:

• Large amounts of resources are spent on manual, repetitive tasks that result in burnout

• Your customers are frequently unhappy about performance or downtime, or you’re breaching SLAs

• Deployment times are slow and deployments often result in issues

While implementing SRE is an effective way to improve reliability, there are some challenges to consider:

• Cultural resistance to change

• Difficulty hiring or training

• Managing excessive toil

You can overcome some of these challenges through phased SRE implementation. Start with less critical pilot projects, implementing automation, error budgets, and continuous improvement as you get more comfortable.

Start building your SRE practice

SRE is one of the most impactful ways to improve reliability and streamline collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. Using SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs to measure system performance helps you minimize incidents, improve the customer experience, and allow developers to focus on innovation.

If you’re ready to adopt SRE, start with a small project, build your team, and focus on refining and continuously improving SRE practices.

You can explore more in-depth guides about SRE to learn more about building an SRE team, or check out JSM to streamline incident management and boost collaboration across teams.