What is SRE? — UK Software Development Guide
Direct Answer
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to IT operations and infrastructure management. Coined by Google in 2003, SRE focuses on: service reliability (SLOs/SLIs/error budgets), automation of operational tasks, and treating infrastructure problems as software problems to be solved with code.
Sre in the UK
SRE has specific relevance to UK regulated software. FCA operational resilience (PS21/3) and NHS DSP Toolkit require demonstrable service reliability — SRE's SLO/error budget framework is the standard way to quantify and communicate this. UK GDPR Article 32 requires "appropriate technical measures to ensure availability" — SRE practices (redundancy, automated failover, load testing) directly implement this requirement. SRE engineers in the UK salary range: £70,000–£140,000 permanent; £520–£750/day contractor.
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