Reflecting on my talk at the London SRE Meetup
Reflecting on my talk at the London SRE Meetup
I recently presented “Working Together: SRE and Platform Engineering” at the London SRE Meetup. The session focused on how the two disciplines complement each other: SRE improves reliability through automation, incident response, and error budgets, while platform engineering elevates developer experience with self‑service, standardisation, and efficient delivery pipelines.
Practical alignment
- User vs. developer experience: SREs optimize reliability and performance for users; platform teams remove friction for developers via internal developer platforms (IDPs).
- Scale and reliability: A stable platform and observability‑by‑default practices make scaling predictable and reduce operational noise.
- Toil reduction: Guardrails and automation cut time spent on provisioning and maintenance so teams can focus on higher‑value work.
Questions to assess your current state
- How mature is your SRE practice, and where does toil still persist?
- Are standards consistent across teams, or is tool creep increasing cognitive load?
- Which operational responsibilities can be safely shifted to developers through a well‑designed IDP?
A pragmatic IDP approach
- CLI‑first workflow with Crossplane for infrastructure orchestration.
- Repository templates with built‑in observability, security hardening, and CI/CD across environments.
- Backstage as the developer portal for service catalogs, documentation, and dependency visibility.
Thanks to everyone who joined and contributed to the Q&A. If you’re exploring the intersection of SRE and platform engineering, the slide deck provides a concise overview of principles, trade‑offs, and implementation patterns.