Many modern development teams incorporate devops, site reliability engineering (SRE), and platform engineering — or at least they claim to. But figuring out what each of these buzzwords actually means can be a slippery proposition, and at first glance they cover much of the same ground.  

We spoke to a number of developers and engineering leaders (some of whom have one or more of these terms in their job title) to get their take on how devops, SRE, and platform engineering differ, and how they overlap. Denis Tiumentsev, who’s currently lead devops engineer at Integro Technologies but has worked in all three areas in the past, put it this way: “Devops is the why, SRE is how to ensure reliability, and platform engineering is how to scale it and make it easy for everyone.” Let’s dive into the details.

What is devops?

Devops began as a cultural movement aimed at tearing down the “wall of confusion” between developers and operations teams. Once upon a time, developers wrote code in a dev environment before throwing it over to the system administrators (ops) to deploy and integrate into the production environment.  But agile methodologies and the cloud changed how we build and deploy software, with many organizations reorienting around modern, cloud-native practices in the pursuit of faster, better releases. That required better integration between, well, dev and ops.

Devops “champions the idea that software delivery and operations are shared responsibilities,” says Rohan Rasane, product architect at ServiceNow. The focus is on automation, collaboration, and continuous delivery. The outputs of devops include CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and strong operational hygiene.

It’s important to remember that while you will see people with titles like “devops engineer,” devops is more a philosophy than a job title. “Devops is not a role. It’s a mindset that influences how developers and operations collaborate across the entire lifecycle of a service,” Rasane says.

What is site reliability engineering (SRE)?

SRE is a discipline that applies software engineering practices and principles to operations problems—and from that description, you can see right away how it covers much of the same ground as devops. As the name suggests, SRE focuses on reliability. “SRE is more production-centric — think reliability, service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs), incident response, error budgets — it’s ops through the lens of engineering,” says Alexander Simonov, deputy devops practice lead at Coherent Solutions.

SRE was originally developed at Google, and soon “was not about keeping the lights on anymore,” says Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP of Product at Progress Software. “It graduated into meaningful objectives such as building software that, if it failed, could recover fast and gracefully.” Key SRE practices include defining SLOs, using error budgets to balance reliability and innovation, and implementing incident response systems.

What is platform engineering?

Platform engineering focuses on improving the developer experience through reusable internal tools and frameworks. “Platform engineering builds the internal platform as a product, so teams don’t reinvent the wheel every sprint: self-service, golden paths, reusable infrastructure,” says Coherent Solutions’ Simonov.

According to Loreli Cadapan, VP of product management at CloudBees, platform engineers “focus on developer experience and providing self-service capabilities. They’re usually the ones tasked to build internal developer platforms (IDPs).”

How devops, SRE and platform engineering differ

While these disciplines share common goals — automation, faster delivery, reliability — they differ in their primary objectives and scope. Rasane conceptualizes the distinctions this way: “Devops primarily revolves around a collaborative culture. SRE emphasizes maintaining high availability. Platform engineering emphasizes developer enablement.”

CloudBees’ Cadapan digs a little deeper:

• “Devops engineers act as a glue between development and operations. Sample KPIs for devops engineers are the typical devops research and assessment (DORA) metrics, such as deployment frequency and change lead time.”
• Platform engineers “reduce cognitive load on developers. Sample KPIs are developer satisfaction or internal NPS and developer onboarding time.”
• “SREs are focused on production reliability and system performance. KPIs tend to be around SLIs and SLOs, and incident response times.”

Where devops, SRE and platform engineering overlap

Despite their differences, these roles often work best in concert. As Progress Software’s Nanjundappa puts it: “Devops drives culture, SRE ensures reliability, and platform engineering scales it for everyone.”

Many of their outputs are similar: infrastructure as code, observability, automation. But the lens differs. “Devops and SRE both aim to improve delivery and operations,” say Integro’s Tiumentsev. “But SRE is more structured and metrics-driven. Platform engineering builds the infrastructure foundation that enables and supports both devops and SRE practices.”

Benjamin Brial, founder of platform engineering company Cycloid.io, emphasizes that all three “share a common goal, which is to improve the efficiency, reliability, and speed of software delivery. Each plays a role in bridging the gap between developers and operations, but they have different focuses and methodologies.”

“While all have a different focus, they all work together to provide infrastructure, reliability, and collaboration, three key facets of modern software development and operations,” Brial says. “One without the others works, but it takes more time, costs more effort, and eventually leads to the need for reorganization of teams and processes.”

The roles also support one another operationally. “A platform team may build reusable pipelines and Kubernetes templates (devops tooling) with built-in SLO monitoring (SRE best practice), all delivered through a self-service portal,” ServiceNow’s Rasane explains.

Room for engineering to grow

One thing to keep in mind is that the tripartite division of concerns here is easiest to realize in larger organizations. “For smaller or early-stage engineering teams, these three titles can blur and overlap,” says CloudBees’s Cadapan. “But as the teams get bigger and mature, you tend to see these roles diverge.”

Cameron Rimington, CEO of Iron Software, explains how his team evolved to accommodate distinct practitioners of all these roles:

“When we had five developers, I wore the devops hat — setting up CI/CD pipelines and managing deployments. Our team grew to 15 people and we hired an SRE who set a proper monitoring and incident response system; the team downtime dropped from four hours a month to 30 minutes. Now, at 40 people, our platform engineer built internal APIs that let developers spin up test environments in minutes instead of hours.”

The conceptual overlap can make the growth and hiring process tricky. Integro’s Tiumentsev notes that “sometimes a company says they’re hiring for devops, but in reality, they want someone who’s a mix of devops and SRE.” Rimington’s takeaway: “Don’t chase trendy titles. Hire for the specific problem you’re trying to solve right now.”

The 3-legged stool of devops, SRE and platform engineering

Devops, SRE, and platform engineering are all interconnected. They differ in emphasis but together form a powerful triad for delivering quality software at scale.

As Rasane puts it: “The key to making them work is clear team charters, measurable goals, and product thinking applied internally. Investing in all three — not just in tools, but in people and clarity — is how organizations scale with confidence.”