What Is an SRE? Posted on : Jun 04 - 2022

Keep reading for a complete definition of an SRE. Learn tips to understand the role of an SRE and how to help the SREs in your organization achieve their best.

The SRE role is the most basic and important job within the realm of incident response and reliability management. That you may know.

But what does an SRE do, exactly? How is an SRE different from a developer, a DevOps engineer, and other technical roles? Are SREs independent teams, or do they work as part of other teams?

This article answers these and other questions in order to provide a complete definition of an SRE. Keep reading for tips on understanding what an SRE actually does, and how to help the SREs in your organization be the best they can be.

So, What Is an SRE?

An SRE, or Site Reliability Engineer, is an engineer whose main role is maximizing the reliability of IT systems.

The SRE role is part and parcel of the discipline of Site Reliability Engineering (which, somewhat confusingly, is also represented by the acronym SRE). An SRE, then, is someone who specializes in Site Reliability Engineering within a broader IT organization.

It’s worth noting that the term “Site” within Site Reliability Engineering can be misleading because it implies that SREs only manage the reliability of websites (or, possibly, a local office, if you take “Site” to refer to a worksite or on-premises location). In reality, SREs can help manage any type of system, including but certainly not limited to websites. View More