What is site reliability engineering?
Site reliability engineering uses software practices to measure and improve service reliability.
How it works and where it is used
Service-level indicators measure user experience, while objectives help define acceptable failure. Alarm count alone is not health; alerts should lead to action. Automating repetitive operations frees time to fix systemic issues.
Limits, safety and selection criteria
Backups, capacity, incident response and learning reviews work together. An error budget makes release-speed trade-offs explicit; promising zero outages is unrealistic. A measured user journey matters more than a server merely reporting itself up. For example, the share of searches that finish quickly and successfully over 30 days says more about service than CPU usage alone. A loose target hurts users; a perfect target leaves no room for change. Incident roles, communication and learning reviews form an operating culture. When an error budget is spent, slowing feature releases to address reliability is a conscious product choice. Dashboards should separate stale data from fresh data so a seemingly healthy page does not conceal a stopped update pipeline.