The Harsh Reality: Are SRE Teams an Afterthought?
If you work in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), you’ve likely experienced this before: a major project is rolling out, developers and product teams have had their say, and suddenly – right before deployment – your team gets an email. “Hey, we need you to approve this.” No prior consultation, no reliability planning. And if something breaks? It’s on you.
This isn’t just poor timing or a communication slip-up. It reflects a deeper gap in how reliability is factored into the development process from the start. In this article, we’ll break down why SRE teams must be included earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and how engineering leaders can build a culture that puts reliability upfront.
Why SREs Are Often Left Out of the Loop
Organizations often structure workflows in a way that prioritizes feature velocity over system resilience. As a result, projects tend to follow this sequence:
- Product and engineering teams define the scope – Priorities revolve around features and business goals.
- Developers build the solution – Code is written, tested, and prepared for deployment.
- Quality assurance (QA) tests the application – Edge cases are considered, but resilience testing is often skipped.
- SRE is looped in at the last minute – The team is expected to sign off on a project they had no influence over.
The Problem? SREs Are Expected to Be Firefighters
At this stage, SRE teams are stuck in reactive mode. They inherit:
- Poorly designed failure handling
- Overloaded monitoring and alerting systems
- Service-level objectives (SLOs) that were never feasible to begin with
Instead of improving system reliability, SREs become glorified on-call responders for problems that should have been prevented in the first place.
The Cost of Ignoring SRE Early On
When reliability is treated as an afterthought, the entire organization suffers. Here’s what happens when SRE isn’t involved from the start:
1. More Incident Volume and Downtime
Without SRE input, failure modes aren’t anticipated, leading to a greater likelihood of outages. If the system wasn’t built with fault tolerance in mind, minor failures cascade into major incidents.
2. More Time Spent on Hotfixes
Reactive firefighting pulls SRE teams away from their actual job: improving system reliability. Instead of building automation and improving observability, they’re constantly patching production issues.
3. Blame and Accountability Issues
When deployments go wrong, SREs are often unfairly blamed. This creates a culture of fear, where reliability teams hesitate to push back against bad practices, and developers see SRE as a bottleneck rather than an ally.
Shifting Left: How to Embed SRE in the Development Lifecycle
The key to preventing these issues is simple: SRE needs to be involved earlier in the process. Here’s how organizations can shift reliability left:
1. Define Reliability as a Product Requirement
Reliability isn’t something you “bolt on” later. Before a project even starts, product and engineering teams should collaborate with SRE to define key reliability goals.
- What are the SLOs and SLAs for this service?
- How does it handle failures and degraded performance?
- What are the observability requirements (logs, metrics, tracing)?
2. Make SRE a Partner, Not a Gatekeeper
Many teams treat SRE as an approval checkpoint, rather than an active participant in design and development. Instead:
- Embed SREs within development teams to provide guidance throughout the SDLC.
- Require SRE sign-off on architectural decisions before implementation begins.
- Encourage blameless retrospectives to foster a culture of learning rather than finger-pointing.
3. Automate Reliability from Day 1
Instead of fixing reliability after deployment, organizations should invest in automated reliability tools:
- Chaos engineering: Proactively test failure scenarios before they happen.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Define scalable and repeatable reliability patterns.
- Automated SLO enforcement: Alert teams before reliability goals are breached.
4. Incentivize Early Engagement
One of the best ways to get dev teams to involve SRE early is by offering incentives. Some effective strategies include:
- Pairing sessions with SREs: Offer dedicated office hours where developers can get reliability guidance.
- Recognition for teams that engage early: Celebrate teams that proactively involve SRE in design reviews.
- Prioritized support: Give first-priority response to teams that follow best practices.
Redefining SRE’s Role in Your Organization
At its core, SRE should not be a reactive function. Instead, reliability engineering should be embedded throughout the entire product lifecycle:
| Phase | SRE Involvement |
| Planning | Define reliability goals, SLOs, and failure expectations |
| Development | Review architecture, implement observability best practices |
| Testing | Chaos testing, load testing, failure injection |
| Deployment | Ensure progressive rollouts, enforce SLOs |
| Operations | Improve incident response, analyze failures |
If your organization treats SRE as an afterthought, it’s time to change that.
Conclusion: Make Reliability a First-Class Citizen
SRE should be part of the process from day one, not just brought in when something breaks. It’s a hands-on approach to building reliable systems, not a last-minute checkpoint.
By embedding reliability earlier in the SDLC, companies can:
- Reduce incident volume and downtime
- Minimize firefighting and increase engineering efficiency
- Build a culture where reliability is everyone’s responsibility
It’s time to stop treating SRE like an emergency hotline and start treating it like an essential partner in software development.
If your organization struggles with these challenges, it may be time for a cultural shift. The sooner SRE is involved, the more resilient and scalable your infrastructure will be.