SRE vs. Platform Engineering

Over the past decade, cloud-native engineering has led to a convergence on best practices for building and deploying applications, including continuous delivery, containerization, and observable systems. This shift has also changed how organizations are structured, moving from large departments to smaller, independent development teams supported by site reliability engineering (SRE) and platform engineering functions. SRE focuses on improving reliability while minimizing the impact of failures, whereas platform engineering accelerates software delivery by ensuring application development teams are productive throughout the software lifecycle. Both roles apply a common set of principles such as treating every failure as a systemic issue, building self-service platforms, and eliminating toil. DevOps and GitOps are related concepts that focus on automation, infrastructure as code, and applying software engineering principles to manage different aspects of infrastructure. Together, SRE and platform engineering teams unlock the productivity of application development teams in cloud-native organizations.