The State of SRE in 2025: Still Reliable?¶
It’s easy to forget how quickly things shift in tech—until you stop and really look.
I’ve been steeped in Site Reliability Engineering for years now. Long enough to watch it morph from an aspirational import from Google’s playbook into a real, grounded discipline—and then into something that, in some orgs, is starting to lose its identity.
So… where is SRE today?
SRE Isn’t Dead, But It Is Tired¶
We're past the SRE boom years, when everyone was scrambling to build golden dashboards and write blameless postmortems. What we’re seeing now is a kind of “SRE fatigue.” Teams are overburdened. Tooling has exploded. Expectations are sky-high—but clarity on role boundaries? Not so much.
At some companies, the SRE role has been diluted. It's become “ops with a sprinkle of Python,” or “on-call engineer with fancy titles.” That’s a problem.
The Craft Is Still There¶
Despite the noise, good SRE work is still happening. Some teams are doubling down on engineering rigor. They’re building self-healing systems, creating real SLO culture, and treating incidents as data, not just firefighting.
The best teams I’ve seen are doing less—but better. They’re resisting the lure of infinite tooling and focusing instead on the basics: reliability, scalability, and the human side of engineering.
What Needs to Change?¶
- Less Heroism, More Systems Thinking: Burning out your best engineers isn’t a reliability strategy.
- Better Onboarding into SRE Mindsets: Not just tools, but why they exist.
- Executives Need to Buy In—Properly: You can’t sprinkle SRE on top of a shaky foundation and expect uptime miracles.
A Field in Flux¶
SRE isn't fading—it’s evolving. In 2025, the challenge is making sure it evolves well. That means protecting the core ideas from dilution while embracing the practical realities of modern teams.
I’ll be writing more about specific trends, pain points, and tools that matter soon. But for now, I just wanted to plant this flag.
SRE is still worth fighting for.
Share¶
If this resonates—or doesn’t—I’d love to hear from you.
You can drop a comment below or find me on (bluesky)[https://bsky.app/profile/nerddotdad.bsky.social]