What is SRE?
Site Reliability Engineering: a discipline pioneered by Google that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations problems. SRE teams treat reliability as a software problem, codify operational toil into automation, define Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and use error budgets to balance innovation speed with stability.
My perspective
In practice
The central SRE insight: any operations work a human does repeatedly can be automated, and automating it is more valuable than doing it. Error budgets give teams a shared language for the speed-vs-stability tradeoff: as long as the error budget remains, ship fast; when it is consumed, fix reliability first.