Applying software engineering principles to ensure scalable and reliable systems.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is not a job title; it is an ethos. It is the disciplined application of software engineering principles to design, build, and operate reliable, scalable systems. And it is essential if you want to survive modern software delivery.
SRE builds resilience by design, not by accident. It makes reliability a first-class product feature: measured, automated, and continuously improved. This ethos aligns perfectly with the Azure DevOps journey — moving from on-premises to SaaS, from two-year release cycles to daily deployments, and from siloed development to integrated, accountable delivery.
With the shift-left movement pushing more operational accountability onto engineering teams, the old excuses no longer work. Feature teams can no longer shrug and say, “Ops will handle it.” They own their live site experience end-to-end — from ideation to validation, from code to customer.
Here’s what that demands:
The Azure DevOps Services team learned this the hard way. Moving from a monolithic, on-premises delivery model to SaaS forced a fundamental rethink. They didn’t just automate pipelines. They embedded a production-first mindset, shifting quality left, closing feedback loops, and treating resilience as part of the Definition of Done.
Their key lessons:
SRE and DevOps together deliver continuous value. DevOps brings the union of people, process, and products; SRE ensures that union runs reliably under real-world stress. This is not about vanity metrics or theatre. It is about evidence-based management — metrics like Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), deployment frequency, and customer satisfaction that tell you whether your resilience investments are delivering.
Bottom line: if your teams are not actively designing, measuring, and improving resilience, you are not running a serious engineering organisation. You are just hoping you survive the next failure.
Stop hoping. Start engineering.
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
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