What is the difference between SRE and DevOps?

SRE is an implementation of DevOps with specific practices. DevOps is a culture/philosophy; SRE provides concrete methods like SLOs, error budgets, and toil measurement. SRE originated at Google and focuses on reliability. Many organizations blend both approaches.

How long does it take to become an SRE?

With software engineering or operations background, 1-2 years to transition. Building expertise in SRE practices (SLOs, incident management, chaos engineering) takes another 2-3 years. Senior SRE roles require 5+ years of production experience.

Do SREs need to code?

Yes, coding is essential. SREs automate toil, build internal tools, write monitoring systems, and contribute to service reliability. Python and Go are most common. Expect to spend 50%+ time on engineering work, not just operations.

Is SRE a good career in 2026?

Excellent career choice. Companies increasingly need reliability experts as systems grow complex. SRE salaries are among the highest in tech. Demand exceeds supply, especially for experienced SREs. The role continues evolving with cloud and AI.

What background is best for SRE?

Software engineering or system administration both work. Developers learn operations; ops people learn coding. Understanding distributed systems is crucial. Database, networking, or security backgrounds also translate well to SRE.

How do I handle on-call as an SRE?

On-call is part of SRE work. Good practices: actionable alerts only, clear runbooks, blameless postmortems, and on-call compensation. Teams rotate responsibility. Work to reduce on-call burden through automation and better reliability.

What tools do SREs use most?

Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring, PagerDuty for alerting, Kubernetes for orchestration, Terraform for IaC, and Python/Go for automation. Also: ELK stack, Jaeger for tracing, Chaos Monkey for testing. Tools vary by organization.

How do I prepare for SRE interviews?

Study: system design, Linux internals, networking, coding (Python/Go). Practice: debugging scenarios, incident response, SLO design. Know concepts: error budgets, toil, blameless postmortems. Google's SRE books are essential reading.

2026 Roadmap

Site Reliability Engineer Roadmap

Master SLOs, observability, incident management, chaos engineering, and reliability practices. Your complete guide to becoming an SRE in 2026.

8-14 Months•Advanced•High Demand

What is a Site Reliability Engineer?

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) ensure that software systems are reliable, scalable, and efficient. They bridge development and operations, using software engineering to solve infrastructure and operations problems.

As an SRE, you will define and track SLOs, manage incidents, automate toil, implement observability, conduct chaos experiments, and build resilient systems that users can depend on.

Key Responsibilities

Define and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Build observability (monitoring, logging, tracing)
Manage incidents and conduct blameless postmortems
Automate toil and repetitive operations tasks
Implement chaos engineering practices
Ensure system capacity and performance
Collaborate with developers on reliability

Learning Roadmap

Click on any topic to mark it as complete

Your Progress0/21 completed

Foundation

You have foundation skills!

SRE Principles

Observability

You can observe systems!

Incident Management

Reliability Practices

You can ensure reliability!

Automation & Toil

Containers & Orchestration

You can manage platforms!

Chaos Engineering

Performance Engineering

Advanced SRE

You are a Site Reliability Engineer!

Not Started

Completed

Milestone

SRE Salaries 2026

United States (USD/Year)

Entry (0-2 yrs)

$90K - $120K

$105K

Mid (2-5 yrs)

$120K - $170K

$145K

Senior (5-8 yrs)

$160K - $220K

$190K

Staff/Principal (8+ yrs)

$200K - $300K+

$245K

India (INR/Year)

Entry (0-2 yrs)

₹10L - ₹18L

₹14L

Mid (2-5 yrs)

₹18L - ₹32L

₹24L

Senior (5-8 yrs)

₹32L - ₹50L

₹40L

Staff (8+ yrs)

₹50L - ₹80L+

₹62L

SRE salaries are among the highest in tech due to the critical nature of the role. FAANG companies pay premium for experienced SREs. On-call typically comes with additional compensation. Platform/infrastructure specialization adds value.

Project Ideas

Build these to strengthen your portfolio

Monitoring Stack

Beginner

Prometheus + Grafana setup

PrometheusGrafanaAlertingDashboards

SLO Dashboard

Beginner

Build SLO tracking system

SLIsSLOsError BudgetsVisualization

Incident Management

Intermediate

Automated incident workflow

PagerDutySlackRunbooksAutomation

Chaos Testing

Intermediate

Chaos engineering pipeline

Chaos MonkeyGame DaysFault InjectionRecovery

Auto-Scaling Platform

Advanced

Intelligent auto-scaling

KubernetesHPA/VPACustom MetricsPrediction

Multi-Region DR

Advanced

Disaster recovery system

Multi-RegionFailoverData ReplicationTesting

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Roadmaps

DevOps

CI/CD and automation

View Roadmap

Cloud Engineer

Cloud infrastructure

View Roadmap

Linux

Linux administration

View Roadmap

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