As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Software delivery needs a strong foundation and consistent process for teams to reach their reliability, scalability, and efficiency goals.
When building and running critical systems, two operational models often come into focus: DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE). Each uses a distinct approach to achieve similar target outcomes, like improving uptime or deployment speed.
Whether you’re evaluating how to structure your internal teams, enhance service reliability, or align with a managed service provider, understanding the differences between SRE and DevOps is key to choosing the right model for your operations strategy. In this article, we’ll explore the key features of SRE vs. DevOps and how to determine which aligns best with your systems and priorities.
What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
Site reliability engineering is a discipline that applies software development principles to infrastructure and operations tasks. The goal is to improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of critical systems and services. SRE teams use code to automate manual processes, manage incident response, and monitor system health—ensuring services remain available and resilient at scale.
Key Principles
Some of the key principles involved in SRE include:
- Service level indicators (SLIs): Metrics collected to determine the health and performance of a service. This can include latency, availability, error rate, and throughput.
- Service level objectives (SLOs): Targets set to assess the reliability and performance of a service. These are generally defined using at least one SLI.
- Error budgets: The allowable threshold of service unreliability within a given period, as derived by the SLO. For example, if the availability target is 99.99%, then the error budget would be 0.01% downtime.
- Minimize toil: Finding opportunities to reduce the amount of manual, low-impact work where possible by adding more automation.
- Automation through CI/CD: Continuous integration and delivery using automated pipelines, which supports SRE by reducing deployment risk and accelerating safe releases.
- Monitor systems: Continuous, comprehensive monitoring of data from all layers of a system to understand the current state and unearth potential issues.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a cultural and organizational movement designed to break down silos between software development and IT operations. It emphasizes collaboration, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle.
The goal of DevOps is to deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably by integrating development, testing, deployment, and operations into a unified workflow.
DevOps serves as a broad philosophy, while SRE is a way to implement its principles with a structured focus on automation, reliability, and service-level metrics. The two approaches are complementary: DevOps promotes the culture; SRE brings the engineering discipline to make it operational.
Key Principles
In DevOps, teams focus on the following key principles:
- Collaboration: DevOps fosters close communication between development, operations, and other teams to break down silos and encourage shared responsibility for service delivery and uptime.
- Tooling: DevOps teams use a suite of integrated tools for infrastructure as code, monitoring, version control, automation, and collaboration for consistency and speed across the delivery pipeline.
- Automation: DevOps practices aim to automate repetitive tasks like building, testing, provisioning, and deploying code to reduce errors and speed up workflows.
- Gradual changes: DevOps promotes making small, frequent changes to code, to reduce errors and speed up worflows.
- CI/CD: Ensuring code changes are integrated and tested regularly, plus released quickly and reliably.
- Measure everything: Performance, error rates, availability, lead time, deployment frequency, and other metrics are measured to find bottlenecks and move continuous improvement forward.
SRE vs DevOps: Main Differences
| DevOps | SRE | |
| Primary Focus | DevOps focuses on collaboration and automation to deliver software quickly and reliably across development and operations teams. | SRE focuses on applying engineering principles to ensure that systems are reliable, scalable, and resilient in production. |
| Key Metrics |
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| Approach | DevOps is a broader cultural and collaborative practice that aims to bring development and operations teams through shared responsibility and automation. | SRE applies software principles to operations with a focus on reliability, metrics, and automation. |
| Team Structure |
| SRE team members are engineers who have development and operational skills, much like the DevOps team, but their attention is more on inward processes as opposed to outward end products. |
| Origin | Started around 2007-2009 as a grassroots movement to improve collaboration and reduce frustration between software development and IT operations teams. Agile software development and Lean principles informed the approach. | Started in 2003 at Google to help scale systems for operations through the lens of a software engineer. |
| Tooling Examples |
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Benefits and Challenges of SRE vs DevOps
Taking a new approach to software delivery and operations can enable organizations to innovate more effectively than before, but adopting an SRE and/or DevOps migration strategy can also pose new challenges.
Benefits of SRE
Because SRE is focused on monitoring SLIs and meeting SLOs, the performance, availability, and reliability of critical systems often improve. This greater stability can reduce operational strain, as can the software-based approach to finding greater efficiencies in systems. The error budget metric used in SRE means that teams are focused on balancing stability with innovation, never relying too heavily on one or the other.
Challenges of SRE
Adding a new culture to a team takes time. This is the case for SRE and DevOps. For SRE, in particular, businesses will need to identify SLIs and SLOs, which can be difficult to do initially. Organizations may also need to train or hire new team members who have the skills needed to run a successful SRE operation. While there is a balance between innovation and reducing errors, if a team is at risk of exceeding its error budget, feature rollouts may be delayed or gated until reliability approves.
Benefits of DevOps
When teams are streamlined in a DevOps configuration, businesses can expect a faster time to market for new feature updates running through the development and deployment pipeline. The continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) model encourages smaller, more frequent changes, reducing risks associated with more significant updates and decreasing the time between deployments. Because teams are automating steps in the development, testing, and deployment lifecycle, the software quality tends to increase. This cyclical pattern can also mean more innovation happening in a shorter timeframe.
Challenges of DevOps
Again, the cultural shift to a DevOps team can require a lot of upfront investment and a strong endorsement from leadership. Change management can be one of the biggest challenges to switching to a DevOps model. Rapid release cycles can improve features quickly, but they can also lead to more errors if responsibilities and ownership are not outlined from the beginning. DevOps tools are vast and varied, so it’s also important to have the right team members with the right expertise.
What Problems Do SRE vs DevOps Teams Solve?
While both SRE and DevOps practices aim to address challenges across the software development and operations lifecycle, they approach these issues in distinct ways. The diagram and details below cover the differences in how these teams handle problems and what they see as primary problems to begin with.
Problems DevOps Teams Solve
Software system deployment, development, and maintenance are central to the problems DevOps team members endeavor to solve.
- Continuous Delivery Testing: Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is a process in which small portions of code are delivered to the production environment on a more frequent basis and are also tested more quickly. Testing can be more automated using CI/CD tools.
- Shorter Release Cycle: Instead of waiting to deploy large portions of code, DevOps teams release smaller chunks of code on shorter release cycles. This allows for more precise testing, quicker identification of errors, and shorter backlogs for developers to address.
- Development and Maintenance Efficiencies: The software development process can be costly, but DevOps teams can reduce the costs associated with developing and maintaining software by using more streamlined efforts and iterative development strategies.
Problems SRE Teams Solve
SRE teams focus on reliability engineering challenges that often complement DevOps practices. They reduce downtime, improve visibility, and automate operations to make the entire system more resilient.
- Incident Recording: Site reliability engineers (SREs) are often part of the on-call rotation and responsible for documenting incidents thoroughly. They capture root causes, resolution steps, and follow-up actions to support learning and continuous improvement.
- Creating a Knowledge Base: Recording and sharing procedures for incidents is just one example of knowledge-sharing SREs should take on. They should also work on documenting particulars of the software development lifecycle, including development, testing, staging, and production. Documentation also needs to be kept up to date with the latest changes in automation tools and best practices, or it becomes obsolete.
- Lower Mean Time to Recovery: The mean time to recovery (MTTR) is the average time it takes for software systems to return to normal after a problem has been identified. If a bug or issue in production is found, SRE teams can revert the software to its stable iteration to improve the experience for end users.
- Faster Issue Detection: SREs use proactive monitoring and gradual rollouts to detect issues early, often before they impact the full user base. This accelerates mean time to detect (MTTD).
- Automated Everything: Automated tools, coupled with infrastructure as code (IaC), can improve the software rollout process and reduce the risks that come from manual production pushes and subsequent tasks.
When Should You Use SRE, DevOps, or Both?
Businesses do not have to take an either/or approach to SRE and DevOps. Often, the best approach involves implementing a DevOps culture and team and using SRE to tackle operational problems. The tie between the two makes them very effective when working in tandem.
However, if you’re looking to prioritize one over the other, these cues may help. Consider starting with DevOps when you are trying to tackle issues with siloed teams, poor communication, slow releases, and inconsistent environments. SRE can be most handy when you are looking to boost system reliability, incorporate more automation, improve production system health, and support mission-critical or large-scale systems.
How TierPoint Can Help with SRE and DevOps
If you’re looking to build a high-performing, efficient software delivery culture or streamline and automate your development and operations workflows, adopting DevOps and SRE practices can help you get there.
At TierPoint, our cloud experts can support you at every stage. From defining and applying SRE principles to implementing and optimizing your DevOps strategy, we offer the guidance and hands-on expertise you need to improve reliability, accelerate delivery, and scale with confidence. Learn more about our cloud DevOps consulting services.
FAQ
SRE and DevOps are not mutually exclusive. They have different but complementary focuses and objectives. SRE is a specific approach to ensuring the reliability and performance of software systems, while DevOps is a broader cultural and collaborative practice that aims to bring development and operations teams together.
SRE is not better than DevOps. DevOps tends to encompass a wider range of practices, and SRE is a discipline within those practices. Whether your organization uses one or the other will not depend on quality, but on the problem you are looking to solve.
Yes, an organization can use both DevOps and SRE, and this is often the most ideal approach. Since SRE is tied to DevOps, businesses can use both to improve their development and deployment pipelines while ensuring that the reliability and performance of critical systems are maintained. You might think of DevOps as what is necessary to complete the work, whereas SRE answers how you will accomplish it.