https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/tip/The-promise-of-SRE-Can-it-ease-infrastructure-integration
Site reliability engineering was made for DevOps developers. Its goal is to insulate developers from troublesome integration issues with an IT infrastructure that they know little about. SRE can give developers early signals about where an application will fail in production when it is integrated with the rest of the IT architecture.
But does this mean that system engineers -- those who sit on the infrastructure side of IT -- are sold on SRE? And what do the system engineers need to keep doing to ensure that an app with a new enhancement will run?
At the heart of this are application development and integration. Do quick-to-develop-and-deploy Agile applications make integration with an underlying infrastructure stack more or less difficult? SRE proponents say yes. Others aren't so sure.
In June 2025, McKinsey & Company reported that successful SRE use improved operational productivity by 20%-30% and the DevOps developer experience by 30%-40%.
SRE helps developers by bringing system engineers into the development process while an app is being developed. Here's why that matters:
In Agile and traditional Waterfall development, developers build business applications, and then system engineers check for and resolve underlying infrastructure issues after the app is coded. This is a two-step assembly line process. Ideally, SRE changes this to a single-step collaborative process, so application developers and system engineers can work side by side from the start to resolve issues. This saves developers from one of their worst fears: encountering delays while they wait in line for system programming help.
System engineers bring a vital component to the development cycle that developers don't have on their own: a knowledge of the IT infrastructure on which the applications run.
The underlying infrastructure for applications consists of databases, servers, OSes, system subroutines for transaction processing, provisioning, security, network settings and access/integration APIs to cloud and on-premises resources.
A system engineer can help a developer meet service-level objectives (SLOs), such as ensuring that an application achieves 99.9% uptime and processes a certain number of transactions per second. Because the average application invokes numerous internal infrastructure routines for access and services, a performance or integration issue could occur at any of these points.
For instance, a developer might not know about a database schema change that causes an app to fail, or a new OS or software release might render an app incompatible. Both are IT infrastructure changes that a system engineer working alongside an application developer can quickly discern and resolve.
An SRE practice that pairs system engineers with application developers in the early phases of application development will plug many gaps in infrastructure integration that developers struggle with today -- but not all of them.
Here are four infrastructure integration gaps:
Especially with Agile, applications are constantly changing -- and so are databases, network configurations, storage management, servers and security on the infrastructure side. However, the rate of change is much faster on the applications side. An SRE methodology can't eliminate or synchronize every change management issue.
SRE automation tools can resolve infrastructure integration problems on their own, but this automation goes only so far and will always be generic. It won't be able to navigate highly customized APIs into the many legacy systems that enterprises run and developers need to access. In these cases, system engineers must perform the integrations, which will take extra time.
In cases where data is incomplete or broken, data analysts must get involved. Developers often see these issues on hastily constructed test databases, but data issues can occur in production staging, too -- especially if a database schema or access point has been changed.
System engineers typically prefer working alone. It will be a big change for them to work alongside application developers, and this could be a cultural integration challenge for many IT organizations.
In addition to system engineers, other infrastructure personnel will need to work within the SRE concept for SRE to be complete:
SRE is a logical extension of application automation that solves a major developer issue: lack of IT infrastructure knowledge. And although SRE can't solve every infrastructure integration issue, it can solve many of them.
The key now is for sites to identify where SRE can be most effectively employed and how to create a mutually beneficial collaboration between application developers and system engineers.
Mary E. Shacklett is president of Transworld Data, a technology analytics, market research and consulting firm.
24 Mar 2026