Site Reliability Engineering is an approach to the operation and improvement of software applications pioneered by Google to deal with their global, multi-million-user systems. If adopted in full, SRE is significantly different from IT operations of the past, due to its focus on the “error budget” (namely defining what is an acceptable amount of downtime) and the ability of SRE teams to push back on poor software. People on SRE teams need excellent coding skills and—crucially—a strong drive (and bandwidth) to automate repetitive Ops tasks using code, thereby continually reducing toil.
