SRE vs. DevOps: What's the Difference?

Site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps solve different problems. DevOps breaks down silos between developers and operations to ship faster. SRE applies engineering discipline to keep production systems reliable at scale.

Most companies don't choose between them—they use both. DevOps handles the delivery pipeline. SRE handles what happens after code reaches production.

DevOps Overview

DevOps emerged to solve a specific problem: developers wanted to ship features fast, operations wanted stability, and these goals conflicted. The solution was cultural—make one team responsible for both building and running software.

Core DevOps practices:

• Breaking silos: Developers deploy their own code and handle incidents
• Automation: CI/CD pipelines replace manual deployments
• Continuous delivery: Ship small changes frequently instead of big releases quarterly
• Shared responsibility: "You build it, you run it"
• Fast feedback: Find problems in minutes, not weeks

DevOps prioritizes velocity. Deploy multiple times per day. Automate everything. Make rollbacks easy so you're not afraid to ship.

SRE Overview

SRE started as Google's answer to operations that couldn't scale. Traditional ops teams grow linearly—double your traffic, double your staff. That doesn't work at internet scale.

SRE treats operations as software problems. Instead of hiring more people to manually restart services, write code so services never need restarting. Instead of operations engineers following runbooks, hire software engineers to automate the runbooks.

Core SRE practices:

• Error budgets: Quantify acceptable failure (99.9% uptime = 43 minutes downtime monthly)
• SLOs (Service Level Objectives): Define reliability targets based on user needs
• 50% operations cap: SREs spend half their time on engineering projects, not firefighting
• Toil reduction: If you do it manually twice, automate it the third time
• Blameless postmortems: Learn from failures without assigning blame

SRE prioritizes reliability through engineering. Automate operations. Measure everything. Balance speed against stability using math, not politics.

Key Differences

What Each Team Owns

DevOps owns getting code to production. They build and maintain CI/CD pipelines so developers can deploy with a single button. They write Infrastructure as Code so spinning up a new environment takes minutes, not weeks. When someone says "I need a database," DevOps provides a self-service way to get one. Their job is removing friction from the path between writing code and running it in production.

SRE owns keeping production running. They design monitoring so you know about problems before customers do. They write automation that fixes common issues without human intervention—disk full? Old logs get cleaned automatically. They plan capacity so systems don't fall over during traffic spikes. When incidents happen, they respond and then write code ensuring that specific failure can't happen again. Their job is making production systems that don't need constant babysitting.

Different Metrics, Different Goals

DevOps measures how fast you ship. Deploy frequency: are you shipping multiple times per day or monthly? Lead time: how many hours from code written to code deployed? Change failure rate: what percentage of deployments cause problems? Recovery time: when something breaks, how fast do you roll back? These metrics answer one question: can we ship code quickly and safely?

SRE measures how reliable your system is. Actual uptime versus SLO: promised 99.9%, delivered 99.95%? Error budget: how many minutes of downtime remain this month? Toil percentage: are engineers spending 30% or 70% of time on manual work? Latency: are 99% of requests under 200ms? These metrics answer one question: is the system meeting user expectations?

Real-World Example

Here's how DevOps and SRE work together for a large e-commerce company:

Three weeks before Black Friday:

DevOps team: Builds and tests new checkout flow with 20% faster completion time. Deploys to production using automated canary rollout—5% of traffic first, then 25%, then 100% over two days. Monitors deployment metrics: zero increase in errors, rollout continues.

SRE team: Reviews capacity. Last year's peak was 50K requests/second, projecting 75K this year. Current infrastructure maxes at 60K. Writes automation to spin up additional capacity when load exceeds 50K req/sec. Tests by running load tests at 80K req/sec—auto-scaling works, latency stays under SLO.

Black Friday, 2 AM - Traffic spike hits:

What happens: Traffic jumps from 30K to 85K req/sec in 5 minutes. Auto-scaling triggers, adds capacity. But checkout service starts throwing 5% errors—new code has a race condition under extreme load.

DevOps team: Gets paged. Checks error budget: 99.9% SLO means 43 minutes of downtime allowed monthly. Currently at 5% errors = burning through budget at 72 minutes/hour rate. Rolls back new checkout code immediately. Errors drop to 0.1%. Total incident: 8 minutes. Cost: 9.6 minutes of error budget used.

SRE team: Incident resolved quickly because they had automated rollback procedures. Writes post-mortem: race condition only appears above 70K req/sec. Adds new load testing requirement: all code must be tested at 2x projected peak traffic. Changes monitoring: now alerts when error budget burn rate exceeds 5x normal (catches problems in minutes, not hours).

Result: Site stayed up during peak sales period. New feature shipped fast (DevOps). When it broke under load, system recovered in minutes (SRE). Error budget system made the rollback decision objective: "We're burning budget too fast" instead of "Should we risk rolling back during Black Friday?"

When to Use What

You need DevOps if: Your release cycle takes weeks. Your ops team manually deploys everything. Developers wait days for infrastructure. You ship quarterly because deployments are scary.

Fix: DevOps practices—automate deployment, give developers ownership, ship daily.

You need SRE if: Your team spends 80% of time firefighting. You're hiring ops engineers faster than your system grows. You can't predict what breaks production. Arguments about "is this deploy safe?" have no data.

Fix: SRE discipline—error budgets, SLOs, engineering 50% of the time.

You need both if: You have 50+ engineers across multiple products. Production serves high traffic where downtime costs real money. You can staff dedicated reliability engineers and enforce error budgets without executive override.

Reality: Most companies under 100 engineers don't need this yet.

Start with DevOps, add SRE later: Most companies under 100 engineers don't need dedicated SRE teams. DevOps practices with good monitoring get you 90% there. Add SRE when operations load prevents engineering work.

Common Mistakes

Calling Ops Team "SRE"

Renaming your operations team doesn't make them SREs. SRE requires:

• Engineers who can write production code
• Time for engineering work (50% cap on operations)
• Error budgets that actually limit deployments
• Automation culture

If your "SRE team" spends 80% of time on tickets and manual tasks, you have an operations team with a fancy title.

Treating Error Budgets as Suggestions

Error budgets only work if you enforce them. When you exceed budget, you must:

• Freeze feature deployments
• Focus on reliability improvements
• Don't resume features until back under budget

If you ignore error budgets when deadlines pressure you, they're meaningless. The whole point is forcing hard tradeoffs between speed and stability.

Expecting SRE to Handle Everything

SRE teams can't scale if they own reliability for services they didn't build. The pattern that works:

• Development teams own their services' reliability
• SRE team provides tools, platforms, and consultation
• SRE takes on services that meet reliability standards

If SRE becomes a dumping ground for "make this service reliable," you've recreated the old ops team problem.

DevOps Without Operations Skills

DevOps means developers run their own services. That requires operations knowledge: monitoring, debugging production issues, capacity planning, incident response.

Pushing operations work to developers who lack these skills creates:

• Long outages (developers don't know how to debug)
• Alert fatigue (developers don't know what to monitor)
• Service degradation (developers don't do capacity planning)

Train developers in operations, or pair them with people who know production systems.

SRE Without Engineering Skills

SRE means operations through code. That requires software engineering skills: writing production-quality code, testing, architecture, debugging complex systems.

SRE teams staffed with traditional operations engineers can't:

• Build automation that handles edge cases correctly
• Design reliable systems
• Review code for reliability issues
• Scale operations through software

Hire software engineers who want to solve operations problems, not operations engineers who dabble in scripting.

How They Work Together

DevOps provides the foundation: collaborative culture, automation, CI/CD pipelines. This lets teams ship frequently and safely.

SRE provides the structure: error budgets quantify reliability, SLOs define targets, engineering practices scale operations. This lets teams maintain reliability at scale.

Practical integration:

1. Use DevOps practices for delivery: Developers deploy their own code, automated CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, shared ownership
2. Add SRE practices for production: Define SLOs, implement error budgets, automate operations work, dedicated reliability engineering
3. Connect them with error budgets: Error budget from SRE determines deploy frequency from DevOps—objective decision, not debate

The best organizations don't choose SRE vs DevOps. They use DevOps to ship fast and SRE to stay reliable.

The Future: Platform Engineering

Many organizations now build platform engineering teams that support both DevOps and SRE. Platform teams create internal tools that make both fast delivery and reliable operations easier.

Platform teams build:

• Self-service infrastructure for DevOps velocity
• Standardized monitoring for SRE reliability
• Automated operational tasks reducing toil

This centralizes common patterns while letting product teams move fast.

Conclusion

DevOps gets software built and delivered quickly. SRE keeps it running reliably. Modern organizations need both.

The key insight: these aren't competing philosophies. DevOps changes culture and collaboration. SRE adds engineering discipline and measurable reliability.

Start with DevOps if you need to ship faster. Add SRE when operations work overwhelms your team. Use both when you need speed and scale.

Whatever you choose, base it on measurement and automation. That's what both DevOps and SRE actually share—using data and code to solve problems instead of heroics and manual work.

Ready to implement better observability? Uptrace OpenTelemetry APM supports both DevOps delivery pipelines and SRE reliability monitoring with comprehensive metrics, tracing, and logging.

You may also be interested in:

• Top 10 Site Reliability Engineering Tools
• Essential DevOps Tools