Defining Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) are distinct but complementary approaches to improving software development and delivery. SRE focuses on reliability, while Platform Engineering focuses on developer experience and efficiency.
SRE teams ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and performant through monitoring, incident response, and automation. Platform engineers build and maintain internal developer platforms that empower developers to build, deploy, and manage applications more efficiently.
Key aspects of Platform Engineering include:
- Focus: Building and maintaining internal developer platforms to improve developer experience and accelerate software delivery.
- Goal: Provide a standardized, self-service infrastructure and tools that developers can use to build, deploy, and manage their applications more efficiently.
- Key activities: Designing and implementing infrastructure, automating processes, managing cloud resources, collaborating with development teams, and optimizing performance and scalability.
- Target audience: Developers.
- Example: Creating a Kubernetes platform that developers can use to deploy and manage their applications without needing deep knowledge of Kubernetes itself.
Key aspects of SRE include:
- Focus: Ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of systems.
- Goal: Reduce incidents, minimize downtime, and optimize system performance.
- Key activities: Monitoring systems, responding to incidents, automating tasks, capacity planning, and implementing reliability-boosting measures.
- Target audience: IT operations teams and development teams.
- Example: Monitoring application performance, setting up alerts for critical issues, and automating the process of rolling out code changes.
SRE and Platform Engineering are closely related:
- Complementary roles: SRE and Platform Engineering are not mutually exclusive and can be combined to create a powerful development and operations model.
- Collaboration is key: Platform engineers can use SRE principles to build more reliable and robust platforms, while SRE teams can use the tools and infrastructure provided by Platform Engineering to improve system reliability.
- Shared goals: Both teams share the goal of improving the overall efficiency and reliability of the software development lifecycle.
This is part of a series of articles about CI/CD
Platform Engineering vs. SRE: the key differences
1. Focus and goals
Platform Engineering is concerned with building reusable internal platforms that simplify development and deployment for software teams. The focus is on improving developer experience, enforcing architectural standards, and providing the tooling necessary to build, test, and ship code quickly. Goals typically revolve around enabling rapid innovation, reducing friction for developers, and increasing efficiency through self-service capabilities and automation.
SRE is centered on reliability, scalability, and operational excellence. SRE teams are judged by their ability to maintain service availability, meet SLAs, and respond effectively to incidents. Their goals are tightly coupled with measurable outcomes such as uptime, latency, and error rates. SRE focuses more on service health, minimizing downtime, and controlling risk.
2. Key activities and responsibilities
Platform engineers engage in activities such as designing internal developer platforms, implementing infrastructure as code, integrating CI/CD pipelines, and curating service catalogs. They develop self-service interfaces that abstract infrastructure choices, automate environment provisioning, and establish guardrails for compliance and security. Their responsibilities are proactive—building capabilities that development teams can use safely and efficiently from the ground up.
SREs concentrate on monitoring and alerting systems, managing capacity, automating operational tasks, and conducting incident response and post-mortems. They develop scripts and tools for failure detection, promote resilience patterns, and handle escalation during outages. While Platform Engineering builds the foundational layers, SRE is responsible for measuring, maintaining, and improving the reliability of services running on those platforms, often under live production conditions.
3. Target audience
The main audience for Platform Engineering is internal: developers, QA engineers, and often other technical roles within the organization. The platform is built specifically for these users to accelerate their workflows, reduce onboarding friction, and allow teams to focus more on feature delivery and less on underlying infrastructure. The goal is to serve the “internal customer” with reliable, consistent, and easy-to-use infrastructure primitives and APIs.
SRE’s target audience is both broad and layered: it includes internal stakeholders such as developers and business leaders, but also end users who depend on application uptime. SREs design solutions and processes to protect end-to-end user experiences. They are focused not only on efficiency within the organization, but also on public-facing metrics like uptime and performance.
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4. Tooling and infrastructure
Platform engineers build and maintain tooling such as internal developer portals, service catalogs, deployment automation tools, and orchestration platforms. Their technology stack often includes Kubernetes, container registries, infrastructure as code (IaC) frameworks, and self-service APIs. They choose tools that optimize common developer journeys and integrate consistently across different services and teams.
SREs use observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana), incident management platforms, and automation tools for tasks like failover, scaling, and log aggregation. Their infrastructure concerns extend into detailed telemetry, alert policies, and runbooks for root cause analysis. While there is overlap in tools used (like monitoring systems or CI/CD), SRE tool choices are dictated primarily by reliability, scalability, and the ability to quickly respond to and remediate incidents.
5. Metrics and KPIs
Metrics in Platform Engineering focus on developer productivity, platform adoption, ratio of manual vs. automated tasks, and time-to-onboard new projects. KPIs might include developer satisfaction scores, number of deployments per day, infrastructure reuse rates, and platform uptime from an internal perspective. The success of Platform Engineering is measured by how much it streamlines workflows and reduces bottlenecks for engineers.
SRE measures success through service-level objectives (SLOs), error rates, availability percentages, and incident response times. KPIs include mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to resolve (MTTR), on-call load, and uptime as experienced by end users. The SRE’s effectiveness is quantified through metrics that directly impact system reliability and customer trust, with KPIs that map closely to business requirements for stability and continuity.
The relationship between SRE and Platform Engineering
The relationship between site reliability engineering (SRE) and Platform Engineering lies in their shared goal of improving the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of software systems. While both disciplines focus on automating operations and reducing manual intervention, they do so from different perspectives and with distinct priorities.
Platform Engineering provides the foundational tools and infrastructure that enable development teams to build, deploy, and operate applications effectively. It focuses on creating self-service platforms, managing internal systems, and abstracting complexities so that development teams can concentrate on delivering business value. Platform engineers design environments that simplify workflows, improve consistency, and automate tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, and scaling.
SRE focuses on the operational reliability of those platforms. SRE teams ensure that the platforms built by platform engineers can withstand production traffic, meet service-level objectives (SLOs), and remain highly available. They focus on aspects like incident management, performance optimization, and maintaining fault tolerance.
In practice, platform engineers and SREs work closely together. Platform engineers design and build reliable and easy-to-manage systems, while SREs ensure these systems meet high availability and performance standards under real-world conditions. Together, they create infrastructure that enables software teams to deliver quality services at scale.
Best practices for integrating Platform Engineering and SRE
Organizations should consider the following practices to ensure productivity and cooperation between platform engineers and SRE teams.
1. Shared ownership over reliability
Achieving reliability at scale requires shared ownership between Platform Engineering and SRE. Both teams should define reliability standards early in the software lifecycle and ensure platform features meet those standards before being adopted by product squads. Embedding SREs in platform teams or vice versa fosters a culture of collaboration where everyone feels responsible for system health.
This approach helps prevent ambiguities during incidents and aligns all stakeholders behind common reliability goals. Bridging platform and SRE efforts also means defining concrete service-level objectives (SLOs) for platform components as well as application services. Teams should socialize reliability best practices, such as regular resilience reviews or game days, across Platform Engineering and SRE.
2. Unified observability framework
A unified observability framework is essential for effectively integrating platform and SRE practices. Both teams should agree on standardized monitoring, tracing, and logging solutions to ensure consistent data collection across platforms and application services. This shared foundation allows quicker diagnosis of problems, easier correlation between platform and service issues, and improved transparency for all technical teams.
Operationalizing a common observability stack also reduces duplicated effort and fosters reusable instrumentation practices. Platform engineers should expose platform-level metrics (e.g., provisioning latency, deployment failures), while SREs ensure end-to-end coverage for user-facing systems. With unified dashboards and alerting, both roles benefit from greater visibility, which accelerates root cause analysis and supports proactive reliability improvements.
3. Error budgeting for balanced innovation
Error budgets—quantified tolerances for service reliability—create alignment between innovation and stability. By establishing clear error budgets for both platform and application services, organizations prevent unchecked feature delivery from undermining reliability. SREs and platform engineers jointly define these budgets and monitor burn rates to ensure reliability targets are not exceeded as new capabilities are rolled out.
This practice introduces flexibility while enforcing discipline: product and platform teams can innovate freely until error budgets are depleted, but must then shift priorities to reliability work. Regular reviews of error budget consumption promote transparency and prompt discussions when trade-offs are required. By sharing responsibility for error budgets, platform engineers and SREs maintain a healthy balance between user experience and speed of delivery.
4. Invest in tooling that supports both disciplines
Effective collaboration between Platform Engineering and SRE depends on investing in tooling that serves both groups’ needs. Choose automation frameworks, CI/CD tools, and observability solutions that support multi-tenancy, granular permissions, and integration across the entire service lifecycle. Shared tools eliminate silos, streamline handoffs, and improve collective visibility into system health and performance.
Open standards and extensible platforms are particularly valuable, enabling both teams to customize workflows without vendor lock-in or unnecessary complexity. Joint tool evaluations and pilot projects can reveal gaps or overlaps early, helping teams converge on best-of-breed solutions that accommodate shared requirements. Regular tool chain reviews also ensure that platform and SRE investments remain aligned with changing business goals and technology landscapes.
5. Integrated incident management
Incident management benefits significantly from integration between Platform Engineering and SRE functions. Shared incident response procedures, standardized escalation paths, and cross-team retrospectives ensure clear communication and rapid resolution of production issues. By involving both disciplines in incident triage and post-incident analysis, organizations can distinguish between platform-originated and application-originated failures quickly, leading to faster recovery times.
Integrated incident management improves institutional learning by capturing post-mortems from multiple perspectives. This feedback loop allows platform engineers to address systemic infrastructure weaknesses while SREs optimize processes for detection and response. The result is a more resilient environment, where root causes are better understood and recurring problems decrease across both platform and application layers.
How Octopus Deploy supports Platform engineers and SREs
Platform engineers and SREs face the challenge of scaling delivery practices without getting stuck maintaining custom-built internal tooling. Octopus Deploy’s Platform Hub addresses this by providing structured, reusable components that eliminate the need to build platforms from scratch.
Process Templates allow platform teams to create standardized deployment patterns they can centrally manage and automatically distribute to consuming teams. This reduces configuration drift and ensures consistent practices across environments without forcing teams into rigid, one-size-fits-all solutions.
Policies (coming soon) move governance from shadow scripts into the deployment pipeline, enabling platform engineers to write custom rules using Rego that automatically enforce security, compliance, and operational standards. When deployments don’t meet requirements, teams receive clear guidance and remediation steps rather than cryptic error messages.
Project Templates will provide standardization at the project level, allowing platform teams to define best practices for different tech stacks while maintaining flexibility for individual team needs.
This approach lets platform engineers focus on enabling faster, safer delivery rather than spending time building and maintaining internal tooling that becomes increasingly complex as organizations scale.
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