What Is Site Reliability Engineering?

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is becoming a popular approach to app and website delivery, started at Google and expanding to many large technology‑driven enterprises. While the definition of SRE varies widely – from part DevOps to part networking with a dash of customer experience thrown in – the majority of SRE teams are responsible for the following:

• Site maintenance – The SRE team owns the back‑end infrastructure and the customer experience it provides.
• Site infrastructure engineering – Sites with successful customer experiences are highly automated and robust, largely due to the work of the SRE team.
• Relationships – In many cases, SRE teams are also charged with empowering development teams to operate faster and collaborate more efficiently, usually by defining guiding principles and providing self‑service tools.
• Performance tracking – SRE teams identify a company’s critical systems and establish ways to measure the effectiveness of their activities on those systems to ensure there’s a satisfactory return on investment (ROI). These systems can include website traffic, customer data, and website durability, among others.

The SRE team is usually part of a larger development or customer experience (CX) team. In either case, a primary objective of the “parent” team is to maintain and improve customer experience on their organization’s website in the service of achieving business goals.