The terms ‘DevOps’ and ‘SRE’ are often used interchangeably, with SRE methods and techniques accompanying DevOps culture and practices, though there are several key differences.
The term ‘DevOps’ is short for ‘development and operations’, and it refers to the culture and practices of collaboration between software developers and IT operations professionals. The goal of DevOps is to shorten the software development life cycle and increase the frequency and quality of software releases. ‘SRE’, on the other hand, stands for ‘site reliability engineering’. SRE is a set of practices and principles for achieving operational excellence with cloud-based services.
SRE teams work to ensure that DevOps procedures create quality software and meet operational Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
SREs typically have a background in operations and software development, while DevOps teams can include QA experts, developers, engineers, and SREs.
While both DevOps and SRE are concerned with improving the quality and speed of software development, they are distinct approaches with different goals.