The shift from “DevOps” to “Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)” is partly a naming change, but in many companies it also reflects a move toward more structured accountability around system reliability. DevOps, at its core, is a cultural and organizational approach focused on breaking down silos between development and operations, improving collaboration, automation, and delivery speed, but it doesn’t define strict roles or measurable reliability targets. SRE, which originated at Google, takes many DevOps principles and makes them more engineering-driven by introducing clear metrics like SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and error budgets, which directly connect system reliability to engineering decisions. In practice, this means SRE teams often have explicit ownership of production reliability, incident response, and system performance, while still doing software engineering to automate operations. Companies tend to prefer SRE when systems become large and complex because it provides clearer rules, accountability, and measurable reliability goals, whereas DevOps is often preferred as a broader cultural model for improving collaboration across teams; so rather than one replacing the other, SRE is often seen as a more formal, implementation-focused evolution of DevOps principles.