This is the eighth edition of the SRE Report. Eight years of tracing reliability’s arc, from uptime obsession to experience, from toil to intelligence, from systems to people. As in past years, the data revealed a mix of progress and persistent gaps – some expected, some not, and in almost every case, the gaps widen when visibility thins out.
Inside, you’ll see how reliability has been redefined in practice: “slow is the new down,” and speed has become one of reliability’s clearest trust signals. SREs and leaders overwhelmingly agree that performance degradations are as serious as outages, yet only a minority consistently connect performance work to business KPIs like revenue or NPS. The report highlights this disconnect between belief and measurement, showing where reliability is still trapped in engineering metrics and where it is finally breaking into the language of strategy, cost, and competitive advantage. If you’re trying to make the case that reliability belongs in the boardroom, this is fuel for that conversation.
The findings also trace three fault lines shaping the next era of reliability: the rise of AI in the reliability stack, the courage gap around chaos and resilience engineering, and a sobering look at how little protected learning time most practitioners actually have. You’ll see AI move from hype to cautiously optimistic adoption, with leaders and practitioners experiencing its impact on toil very differently. You’ll see how few teams are willing to “break what they build” in production, and what sets the bold minority apart. And you’ll see why learning time is emerging as reliability’s last frontier, with knowledge decay itself becoming a reliability risk. If any of these tensions sound familiar, the full report will not just validate your experience—it will help you argue for what needs to change next.
