SRE vs. Platform Engineering: The Key Differences Posted on : May 20 - 2022

What are SREs? What are platform engineers? How is each role similar and different? This article explains the answers to each question.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams and Platform Engineering teams share similar goals, like maximizing automation and reducing toil, and similar methodologies. However, they have different priorities and use somewhat different tools to achieve them.

What are SREs? What are platform engineers? How is each role similar and different? This article explains.

Main Responsibilities of SREs and Platform Engineers

The main responsibility of Site Reliability Engineers is ensuring that IT systems are reliable, which means that the systems meet performance requirements. Part of their job includes working with developers and IT operations teams to maximize the reliability of applications as they move down the software delivery pipeline.

Meanwhile, Platform Engineers focus on managing and optimizing the software delivery process. You could think of this role as one that translates DevOps principles into practice by finding ways to implement continuous delivery, continuous improvement, and other DevOps priorities.

Thus, both SREs and Platform Engineers play a role in managing the software delivery process and finding ways to make it as smooth and efficient as possible. They also share a common enemy: toil, in the sense that both groups seek to avoid manual, inefficient processes by automating as much as possible. SREs automate complex incident response operations using various tools, while Platform Engineers might deploy methods like GitOps to automate some aspects of software delivery. View More