Using infrastructure effectively is a competitive advantage for Google and their SREs carry tremendous authority and respect for executing on that mission.

I’ve been writing about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) tasks for nearly 5 years under a lot of different names such as DevOps, Ready State, Open Operations and Underlay Operations. SRE is a term popularized by Google (there’s a book!) for the operators who build and automate their infrastructure. Their role is not administration, it is redefining how infrastructure is used and managed within Google.

SRE is about operational excellence and we keep up with the increasingly rapid pace of IT.  It’s a recognition that we cannot scale people quickly as we add infrastructure.  And, critically, it is not infrastructure specific.

via Evolution or Rebellion? The rise of Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) — Rob Hirschfeld