Site reliability engineers and cloud reliability experts

Site reliability engineers make production health measurable when dashboards fail to explain customer-facing errors. They review telemetry against application behaviour and identify gaps in incident detection.

• SLIs and SLOs: Define availability and latency indicators, then establish error budgets that inform release decisions.
• Monitoring and alerting: Configure Prometheus and Grafana, or work within an existing monitoring stack. Tune alerts around actionable symptoms and use OpenTelemetry traces to investigate failures across service boundaries.

Cloud infrastructure reliability consultants assess where a failed dependency or exhausted capacity could interrupt service. They review AWS or Azure architectures and prioritise changes against recovery objectives and operating constraints.

For Kubernetes workloads, SREs configure resource requests and limits, then validate autoscaling behaviour under load. Infrastructure reviews cover failure-domain isolation and dependency timeouts. Specialists can also run controlled failure tests to check whether redundancy works as expected, with safeguards agreed before testing production systems.

Bring in an SRE when recurring incidents consume engineering time or recovery procedures have never been tested. The specialist investigates production failures using logs and traces, then records contributing causes and corrective actions in incident reviews.

Recovery work includes writing executable runbooks and validating backup restoration against recovery time and recovery point objectives. SREs can support an existing on-call rotation and rehearse failover procedures with application owners. Coverage arrangements and escalation responsibilities are agreed for the specific assignment.

Reduce repetitive production tasks with SREs who write automation and maintain infrastructure as code. Terraform changes can include validation checks and drift detection, while GitHub Actions pipelines can enforce release gates based on service health.

Specialists investigate configuration differences between environments and replace manual recovery steps with reviewed scripts. For services with frequent releases, they implement canary rollouts and rollback conditions. Load testing checks capacity assumptions before changes reach production, with thresholds tied to the service's agreed reliability targets.