How mid-market companies can adopt SRE practices without a dedicated SRE team.
SRE Is Not Just for Google
Site Reliability Engineering originated at Google, but the principles apply to any organization that runs production systems. You do not need a thousand engineers to benefit from SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortems. You need a commitment to treating reliability as a feature — one that gets measured, prioritized, and invested in alongside product development.
Start with SLOs
Service Level Objectives are the foundation of SRE practice. Define what good looks like for your users: 99.9% availability, p95 latency under 200ms, error rate below 0.1%. These are not aspirational targets — they are contracts with your users that drive engineering decisions.
Error budgets are the natural consequence of SLOs. If your SLO is 99.9% availability, you have 43 minutes of downtime per month to spend. When the budget is healthy, ship features fast. When it is burned, slow down and invest in reliability. This removes the eternal tension between velocity and stability.
Observability Before Automation
You cannot automate what you cannot observe. Before building automated remediation, invest in comprehensive observability: metrics (Prometheus), logs (Loki or ELK), traces (Jaeger or Tempo), and dashboards (Grafana). When an incident occurs, your first question should be answered by a dashboard, not a developer.
CloudGen SRE Practice
CloudGen helps mid-market companies implement SRE practices without the overhead of a dedicated SRE team. We start with SLO definition, build observability foundations, implement incident response processes, and gradually introduce automation. The goal is reliability as a practice, not a team.
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