# What is an SRE? Understanding the responsibilities of this crucial function

DevFeed: [What is an SRE? Understanding the responsibilities of this crucial function](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/what-is-an-sre-understanding-the-responsibilities-of-this-crucial-function-12075.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/what-is-site-reliability-engineering>)

Author: incident.io

Published: 2023-07-14T17:54:40Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [site-reliability-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/site-reliability-engineering.md>), [SRE](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/sre.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Google](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/google.md>)

Tags: [administration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/administration.md>), [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [operations](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/operations.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scalability.md>), [site-reliability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/site-reliability.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>), [sre](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/sre.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains site reliability engineering (SRE) as a discipline that combines software engineering and systems administration. It describes SRE's focus on reliability, scalability, and efficiency, along with responsibilities such as investigating performance issues, automating toil, and supporting engineering teams. It also introduces SLOs, SLAs, SLIs, and error budgets.

## Source excerpt

Site reliability engineers are responsible for quite a bit, but one thing is clear--their role is critical. In this article, we break down everything you need to know about SREs and what they focus on.