The SRE Landscape: A Map of the Territory
If you ask five engineers to define Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), you will get five different answers. For some, it is simply “operations with a software mindset.” For others, it is strictly about error budgets and Service Level Objectives (SLOs). And for a growing number in 2026, it is the discipline of managing the AI agents that manage the systems. But before we can discuss Agentic SRE—the automation of reliability work by autonomous AI—we must agree on what work is actually being done. You cannot automate what you do not understand. ...