When a team starts building an app, things usually look simple. A repo, a server, a database, sometimes Docker, deploy over SSH — and it works. At that stage almost nobody thinks about DevOps, SRE, developer platforms, and similar buzzwords.
When we talk about DevOps and SRE, many people imagine that a company simply decides to “switch to SRE” one day. In reality this almost never happens. Companies do not jump from DevOps to SRE. They grow into SRE gradually, usually over several years, as systems become more complex and downtime becomes more expensive.
Many companies ask the same question at some point: **Do we need DevOps engineers, or do we need SRE?** This is not just a technical question. This is a **business decision about reliability, risk, and growth**. In this article we will look at: - when DevOps is enough - when SRE becomes necessary - how to decide from a business perspective - what criteria to use - common mistakes companies make
Over the last decade, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) have become standard approaches to building and operating modern infrastructure. Many companies use these terms interchangeably, but they are not the same. Understanding the difference is important for business decisions, hiring, and infrastructure strategy. In this article, we look at DevOps and SRE from a business perspective: what they are, how they differ, and when each approach makes sense.
In this article, we will look at the key signs that indicate your infrastructure may need SRE support.
