Site reliability engineers (SREs) are tightly woven into DevOps today. They also provide a changing and critical role in deployments on cloud native platforms and microservices deployments. But as a job description and function, an SRE position and role is often described  incorrectly — in that way, the definition of an SRE can mean many different things, depending on whom you talk to.

And yet, SREs do share some common responsibilities in DevOps, especially in cloud native environments where the roles of development and operations are often very different compared to those for traditional monolithic and on-premise  infrastructures.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst,  expressed this truism: “One thing I would characterize most SREs by are that they are great with writing automation and scripts and using the tools themselves to do something custom In their environment.