What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and who started it?

SRE is a software-engineering approach to IT operations: SRE teams use software as their tool to manage systems, solve problems and automate operational tasks. Google institutionalised it in 2003.

The idea is to staff operations with engineers who write code. Instead of doing a repetitive task by hand every week, an SRE writes software that does it. Ben Treynor Sloss, who founded Google's SRE team, described it as "what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team".

SRE and DevOps share most of their principles (automation, accepting failure, measurable reliability targets) and are often named together as "DevOps/SRE". A common way to put the relationship: DevOps is the culture and set of goals, and SRE is one concrete way to implement them.

Go deeper:

• Google SRE book — Introduction (Ben Treynor Sloss) — the founder explains SRE in his own words.
• Site reliability engineering — Wikipedia — how the practice spread beyond Google.