Before reading this article keep one thing in your mind that, there’s no “fight or versus” between them. They both are just different approaches for how to deliver better software faster. They both have built on the same principles. We can say, Site reliability engineering and DevOps engineering are two sides of the same coin with a shared purpose, to break down organizational silos to deliver better software, faster.
Whenever a new thing comes up in the industry, it spikes the interest and generates the question: How it’s different from what we’re already doing? And can we do things in a better way if we implement the new concept?
If we compare SRE and DevOps at a high level, there aren’t many differences between the two concepts, these two approaches share similar goals and broadly similar methodologies. But there are differences between SRE and DevOps:
DevOps is a practice to bridge the gap between the typically siloed development and operations teams. Before DevOps, these two teams were rarely communicating, use to collaborate very less on work.
And If we will talk about the Site Reliability Engineering, we can say it is the next stage of implementation of DevOps practices. SRE is more foused about how things are to be done and define the priorities of the team explicitly are, specifically, the job is to keep the site reliable and available and only tasks that contribute to this goal are prioritized.
To understand the difference you can refer below table and mentioned video to understand and visualize the difference between SRE engineers and DevOps engineers.
You may go through this video where the mentor has explained all the differences between SRE and DevOps engineering in a very easy way without using any technical jargons.