SRE

In 2003, a Google engineer named Ben Treynor Sloss was handed a team of seven software engineers and told to keep Google’s production systems running. His approach — treating operations as a software engineering problem — would eventually reshape an entire industry. But in the two decades that followed, the world changed beneath our feet: monoliths shattered into microservices, on-prem servers migrated to ephemeral cloud infrastructure, and the sheer complexity of modern distributed systems outpaced any human team’s ability to reason about them in real time. Now, we are entering a new era where AI agents don’t just assist operations; they drive them. ...

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. ...