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DevOps & Automation · Foundational

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

A discipline, created at Google, that applies software engineering to operations problems to build scalable and highly reliable systems.

Definition

SRE treats operations as a software problem: teams define reliability targets with SLIs and SLOs, manage risk with error budgets, cap manual toil, and automate repetitive work. It is often described as a concrete implementation of DevOps principles ('class SRE implements DevOps').

Example

An SRE team freezes feature releases after a service exhausts its monthly error budget and spends the time on reliability fixes.

Exam tip

Know the SRE vocabulary (SLI, SLO, error budget, toil, blameless postmortem); Google's DevOps exam tests it heavily.

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