# ITIL vs SRE: why the big clouds went their own way

DevFeed: [ITIL vs SRE: why the big clouds went their own way](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/itil-vs-sre-why-the-big-clouds-went-their-own-way-34015.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://sridharrajarao.com/blog/itil-vs-sre/>)

Author: Sridhar Rajarao

Published: 2026-07-26T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Sridhar Rajarao](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/sridhar-rajarao.md>)

Topics: [SRE](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sre.md>), [site-reliability-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/site-reliability-engineering.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [Terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/terraform.md>), [pulumi](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pulumi.md>), [Availability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/availability.md>), [feature flags](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/feature-flags.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>)

Tags: [automated](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automated.md>), [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [azure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/azure.md>), [cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cloud.md>), [feature-flags](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/feature-flags.md>), [gcp](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gcp.md>), [human-review](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/human-review.md>), [hyperscaler](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hyperscaler.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [infrastructure-as-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure-as-code.md>), [itil](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/itil.md>), [on-call](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-call.md>), [postmortems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/postmortems.md>), [pulumi](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pulumi.md>), [release](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/release.md>), [reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reliability.md>), [service-catalog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/service-catalog.md>), [sre](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sre.md>), [terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/terraform.md>)

## AI overview

This opinion article compares ITIL practices with SRE operations at hyperscaler scale. It argues that human change boards, single production instances, developer-to-operations handoffs, documentation-first configuration management, and weekly release windows do not fit environments serving millions of external customers. It describes automated approvals, gradual deployments, service-team ownership, infrastructure as code, continuous release, error budgets, SLOs, and blameless postmortems as alternatives.

## Source excerpt

The big clouds don't run ITIL. Five assumptions ITIL makes that break at hyperscaler scale, and what AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI use instead.