What is site reliability engineering (SRE)?
Site reliability engineering applies software engineering practice to operations work. An SRE team agrees measurable reliability targets, instruments production against them, and automates the manual work in between. Start with our guide to SRE or the SRE vs DevOps breakdown.
SquareOps runs SRE as a service: SLO design, observability, 24/7 on-call, and incident response on live systems. Our engineers join your rotation and your Slack channel, not a ticket queue. Coverage spans AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Every environment we operate is codified in Terraform and run from written runbooks. Error budgets decide when the team ships features and when it fixes reliability. If you need round-the-clock cover without the full SRE practice, see 24/7 DevOps support.
What's Included in Our SRE Services
SRE work falls into four groups: foundation, operations, automation, and improvement. Here is what each covers, and where we have done it before.
SLI, SLO and Error Budget Design
We pick service level indicators that track what users feel: request latency, error rate, queue age. Then we set objectives and an error budget policy against them. The budget decides when a team ships and when it stops to fix reliability.
Observability and Monitoring Engineering
Metrics, logs, and traces in one stack: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki or ELK, plus New Relic for APM. Dashboards track SLO burn rate, not host CPU. See our Prometheus and Grafana setup service.
In practice: the Prometheus, Grafana, and EFK stack we built for Harappa.
24/7 On-Call and Incident Response
Follow-the-sun rotations in PagerDuty with a 15-minute P1 response and a 30-minute P2 response. Our engineers take the page and run the runbook. We escalate to your team only when the fix sits in application code.
In practice: the round-the-clock incident cover we run for OurShopee.
Postmortems and Reliability Reviews
Every significant incident gets a blameless postmortem: timeline, root cause, and dated action items in the reliability backlog. A monthly review reports SLO attainment, incident count, and the state of those action items.
Security and Compliance Operations
OS and database patching on a schedule, vulnerability scanning, IAM reviews, and cloud security operations with audit trails. SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS controls are checked continuously rather than assembled before an audit.
In practice: Synaptic's multi-account AWS security rebuild.
Infrastructure Automation and Toil Reduction
Manual operations work is measured and then removed with Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes operators. Target: cut toil from over half an SRE's week to under 30%. The rest goes into engineering that prevents the next incident.
In practice: Terraform provisioning that cut Tompkins Robotics onboarding time 80%.
Release and Change Management
Canary and blue-green rollouts through your CI/CD pipelines, automated rollback on SLO breach, database change control, and post-deployment verification. Most production incidents start with a change, so the change path gets the controls.
In practice: the self-service deployment portal we built for LocoNav.
Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning
Load testing before launches and sale events, and autoscaling policies tuned to real traffic. Right-sizing feeds back into cloud cost management. Capacity is planned against a forecast, not added after the first outage.
In practice: MobileSentrix going from 100 to 1,000+ requests per second.
Disaster Recovery and High Availability
Multi-AZ and multi-region architectures, automated failover, backup restores tested on a schedule, and DR drills that measure recovery. RTO and RPO are written into the runbook and proven in a drill, not assumed.
Top Reliability Challenges We Solve
On-call falls on the engineers who build the product
Your senior developers carry the pager because nobody else can. Night pages cost the next day's feature work, and the strongest engineers are the first to leave.
Our Solution
We take primary on-call on a follow-the-sun rotation with a 15-minute P1 response. Your engineers stay on escalation for application-level questions only.
In practice: the 24/7 rotation we run for OurShopee's e-commerce platform.
Nobody has agreed what "reliable enough" means
There is no SLO, so every outage restarts the same argument. Product and operations disagree on acceptable downtime and what to fix first.
Our Solution
We define SLIs from real user journeys and set SLOs with the product owner. The error budget policy states what happens when the budget runs out.
In practice: Revnue's AWS Well-Architected alignment across security, performance, and cost.
Alerts fire constantly and few of them are actionable
Alerting is a list of host thresholds nobody owns. On-call learns to ignore the channel, and the outage that matters arrives with the same notification as a full disk.
Our Solution
Alerts are rebuilt on the four golden signals and SLO burn rate. Each one routes to a named service owner and is reviewed monthly. Anything that does not need a human becomes automation.
In practice: the alerting and monitoring stack Harappa had no version of before.
Manual operations work grows faster than the team
Provisioning, access requests, certificate renewals, and restarts are done by hand. Every new service adds hours of repeat work that never gets automated because nobody has the time.
Our Solution
We measure toil per engineer, then automate the top items with Terraform modules, self-service pipelines, and auto-remediation. Manual steps that remain are written into runbooks.
In practice: LocoNav's self-service deployments, which removed the ops bottleneck.
The same incident happens again a month later
Incidents are resolved in chat and never written up. Action items live in someone's head, so the same failure returns with a different ticket number.
Our Solution
Blameless postmortems within 48 hours, with a documented root cause. Dated action items are tracked in the reliability backlog until they close. Repeat incidents are reported as a metric.
Traffic spikes take the system down on the days that earn the most
Sale events, launches, and campaigns arrive faster than the infrastructure scales. Checkout slows, requests time out, and the revenue peak becomes an outage.
Our Solution
Load testing against the forecast peak, and autoscaling on the metric that saturates first. Database high availability, plus an event-day runbook with an engineer on standby.
In practice: MobileSentrix handling 1,000+ requests per second through flash sales.
How Our SRE Team Operates
Five operational domains that run continuously once onboarding is complete, each with named owners and reported outcomes.
From infrastructure management to incident response, our SRE practice covers production operations end to end across AWS, Azure, and GCP. It runs alongside platform engineering when your developers also need a paved road.
Cloud Infrastructure Management
Compute, storage, networking, and container orchestration. Provisioning, scaling, IAM, and backup management — all codified in Terraform and reviewed like application code.
Observability & Monitoring
Full-stack observability with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Loki. Custom dashboards, SLO tracking, anomaly detection, and alert routing that cuts noise instead of adding to it.
Incident Management
24/7 on-call with PagerDuty integration. Automated detection, documented escalation paths, SLA-backed response times, and a blameless postmortem for every significant incident.
Security & Compliance Operations
Scheduled security reviews, OS and database patching, vulnerability scanning, and firewall management. Continuous control checks for SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Release & Change Management
CI/CD pipeline support, rollback strategies, database change control, canary deployments, and post-deployment monitoring for zero-downtime releases.
Ready to put an SRE team behind your production systems?
Get a free SRE maturity assessment and a reliability roadmap scoped to your stack.
Talk to an SRE ConsultantSRE Onboarding: Your Path to Reliability
A five-step onboarding that moves you to managed SRE operations in two to four weeks. Monitoring goes live in week one.
Discovery & Assessment
We audit architecture, dependencies, monitoring gaps, and twelve months of incident history to build a reliability baseline. If the gaps are structural, an infrastructure audit runs alongside.
SLO Definition & Planning
Service level objectives agreed with product owners, and error budgets set. Severity levels, on-call rotations, and escalation paths are documented for each service.
Monitoring & Observability Setup
Deploy metrics, logs, and alerting across every service. Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK dashboards give real-time visibility into system health and SLO compliance. See monitoring and observability services.
Runbooks & Automation
Runbooks written for the incidents your history says will recur. Automation covers the repeat work: autoscaling, self-healing restarts, patching, and certificate renewal.
Go-Live & Continuous Operations
We take the pager. From there it is 24/7 monitoring and incident response, plus monthly reliability reviews with SLA reporting. The reliability backlog keeps shrinking.
In-House SRE vs SRE Consulting vs Managed SRE
Three ways to get site reliability engineering into your organisation. The right one depends on how fast you need cover and whether you want to own the rotation afterwards.
| Decision factor | In-house SRE team | SRE consulting project | Managed SRE (SquareOps) |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | Engineers you hire, train, and retain | Assessment, SLO design, runbooks, and tooling you then run | An SRE team that owns operations end to end |
| Who carries the pager | Your team, once you have 4-6 engineers | Your team, using the rotation we design | Our engineers, follow-the-sun |
| Time to first value | 3-9 months of hiring and ramp-up | 2-6 weeks | Monitoring live in week 1, full cover in 2-4 weeks |
| Typical cost | $180K-$250K per senior SRE; $720K-$1.5M a year for 24/7 cover | Fixed project fee, no ongoing commitment | $3K-$30K+ a month by environment size and coverage |
| Reliability knowledge stays | In your team, until they leave | In your documentation and code | In shared runbooks and monthly reviews |
| Best for | Large platform orgs with reliability as a product line | Teams with capable engineers and no SRE practice yet | Teams that need 24/7 cover now and want to ship product |
Salary figures are US market averages for senior site reliability engineers. Managed pricing depends on environment size, cloud footprint, and coverage hours. Treat every number as a starting point for a scoping call. The SRE pricing breakdown lists what each tier includes. Many clients begin with a consulting project, then decide whether to run the rotation themselves. The in-house vs managed comparison covers the same trade-off in DevOps.
