A clear breakdown of how a DevOps team and an SRE team can coexist in the same organization, with distinct responsibilities but collaborative workflows.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 DevOps Team vs SRE Team – Two-Team Model

📦 1. DevOps Team – “Enabling Delivery”

Goal: Streamline software delivery, automation, and developer productivity

Responsibility Examples
CI/CD pipeline maintenance GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, Helm
Infrastructure as Code Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes manifests
Secrets & configuration ExternalSecrets, Vault, SealedSecrets
Developer tooling Internal CLI tools, boilerplate generators
Artifact management Docker registries, Helm repos
GitOps enablement ArgoCD, Flux for declarative delivery
Platform engineering Creating reusable templates and platforms

Mindset: Make it easy, fast, and safe for devs to ship code

🚨 2. SRE Team – “Ensuring Reliability”

Goal: Keep services reliable, available, and observable at scale

Responsibility Examples
SLIs/SLOs/Error Budgets Defining latency/availability thresholds
Monitoring & alerting Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager
Incident response/on-call PagerDuty, incident runbooks, retrospectives
Chaos engineering Simulate failures to test resilience
Performance tuning Autoscaling, load testing, caching
Capacity planning Forecasting usage trends and scaling needs
Reliability tooling Tools that reduce toil (auto-healing, alerting bots)

Mindset: Measure everything and eliminate toil through code

🔁 Example Workflow: How They Work Together

Deploying a New Service

Step DevOps Team SRE Team
🏗 Scaffold Provide service template with GitOps/CD Review SLO baseline for service
🚢 Deploy Build pipeline and Helm chart Ensure service is observable
🔍 Monitor Expose logs & metrics via Fluentd, Grafana Define alerts for error rate, latency
🛠 Operate Offer tools to update config or secrets Take on-call for incidents
🔁 Improve Collect deployment feedback Run incident retrospectives

🧱 Org Chart (Simplified)

Engineering Org
├── Application Dev Teams
│   ├── Builds features
│   └── Owns service code
├── DevOps / Platform Team
│   ├── CI/CD & GitOps
│   ├── IaC & Secrets
│   └── Developer enablement
└── SRE Team
    ├── Uptime / on-call
    ├── SLIs/SLOs/Error Budgets
    └── Incident tooling

🤝 Key Principle: You Build It, You Run It

SRE doesn’t take over ownership — it enables developers to own production safely by building reliability into the system.