Article
Why Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is important as the foundation for the resilience and security of digital services
Author: Amin Aliyev, Sales Engineer, BAKOTECH
In today’s digital ecosystem, where high availability and performance are non-negotiable, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged as a critical discipline. With applications spanning multi-cloud environments and systems growing more complex, the need for engineering reliability into software delivery pipelines has never been more urgent.
First introduced by Google, SRE integrates software engineering principles into operations to build scalable and reliable systems. Unlike traditional ops roles, SRE emphasizes automation, proactive monitoring, and systemic resilience. It’s a discipline focused on reducing mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR), managing error budgets, and enabling safe deployments at scale.
Despite its value, maturity remains a challenge. According to Dynatrace’s State of SRE Report 2022, only 20% of enterprises claim to have a mature SRE practice, while 88% of SRE professionals report growing recognition of their strategic role. Thus, despite the positive perception, the actual implementation of SRE practices is still far from ideal.
Key characteristics of SRE
SRE is not a team that fixes everything—it’s a framework that enables everyone to build better systems.
Its features include:
Roles and responsibilities of an SRE
Source: What is SRE (site reliability engineering)? And what do site reliability engineers do?
Modern architecture introduces new challenges: the CNCF landscape now includes over 1,000 open-source tools, making standardization difficult. As the Dynatrace report explains, this fragmentation necessitates a “golden path”—a clear set of best practices and shared observability tooling that all teams can follow, regardless of stack.
Source: State of SRE Report: 2022 Edition
Effective SRE teams create ‘golden paths’ to support safe and fast engineering work.
SREs also play a growing role in security. According to the same report, 68% of SREs expect security responsibilities to become more central as vulnerabilities like Log4j highlight the risk from third-party libraries.
To scale, SRE must evolve from a siloed team into a function that empowers developers and architects with reliable, automated, and observable systems. That means moving from ad hoc scripts to platform-based approaches with “everything-as-code” capabilities and centralized observability.
Moreover, a mature SRE practice doesn’t operate in isolation. It connects engineering metrics like SLOs to real business outcomes such as time-to-market, customer experience, and cost optimization. This alignment makes SRE a strategic function at the heart of digital transformation.
Conclusions
Reliability is crucial to prevent costly downtime and reputational damage. While SRE has become a cornerstone of modern digital business, many organizations are still in the process of establishing it. To truly amplify SRE efforts, especially with the scarcity of skilled engineers, organizations must integrate SRE principles earlier into engineering and design.
The key challenge is moving beyond manual toil and ineffective automation. Simply scripting existing manual processes isn't enough. Instead, SRE teams need platforms that embed reliability and automation by default through self-serve and "everything-as-code" approaches. This empowers developers to build in essential capabilities like observability, testing, and self-healing. Ultimately, this frees SREs to focus on maximizing reliability, resilience, security, and performance, driving significant business value.