DevOps & SRE (overview)
Culture, automation, and reliability-how teams ship often and keep systems stable.
What is DevOps?
DevOps = culture and practices that bring development and operations together. Ship small changes often. Automate build, test, and deploy (CI/CD). Use infrastructure as code. Share responsibility for reliability and security.
Goal: shorten feedback loops, reduce "throw over the wall" between dev and ops, and make releases safe and repeatable.
DevOps
Culture + practices: dev and ops together. Ship small changes often. Automate CI/CD and IaC. Share responsibility for reliability.
SRE
Apply software engineering to ops. Focus on reliability (SLIs, SLOs, error budget), automation, and measurable outcomes. Build tooling; run incidents.
Together
DevOps = how teams work and what they automate. SRE = how you define and achieve reliability. Many teams use both: DevOps for delivery, SRE for reliability.
Shared ideas: automation over manual work, metrics and observability, blameless postmortems, continuous improvement.
What is SRE?
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) = apply software engineering to operations. Focus on reliability (uptime, error budget), automation (reduce toil), and measurable outcomes (SLIs, SLOs, SLAs).
SREs build tooling, run incident response, and help teams improve reliability. They often sit between product and infra: "How reliable should this be?" and "How do we get there?"
How they work together
DevOps is broad: how teams work and what they automate. SRE is a concrete practice: how you define and achieve reliability. Many teams use both: DevOps for delivery, SRE for reliability and incident response.
Shared ideas: automation over manual work, metrics and observability, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.
Sign in to track progress on your dashboard.
Ready to see how this works in the cloud?
Switch to Career Paths on the Academy page for structured paths (e.g. Developer, DevOps) and provider-specific lessons.
View role-based paths