Common challenges faced by Site Reliability Engineers in agile teams

Agile development has revolutionized software delivery, emphasizing speed, iteration, and collaboration. However, for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), this fast-paced model can introduce unique challenges. As guardians of system stability and performance, SREs must adapt their workflows to align with the agility and rapid changes of product teams—without sacrificing reliability. Balancing innovation with operational excellence requires strategic communication, smart tooling, and a shared culture of accountability.

1. Maintaining Reliability Amid Rapid Releases

Agile teams release new features frequently, sometimes multiple times per day. This speed can introduce bugs, misconfigurations, or architectural weaknesses that threaten uptime.

• Frequent deployments increase the risk of introducing instability.
• Rollback strategies may be underdeveloped in early-stage agile projects.
• SREs must often handle incidents related to unanticipated edge cases or overlooked performance issues.

Solution: Build robust CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, canary deployments, and rollback triggers. SREs should advocate for production readiness checks as part of the “definition of done.”

2. Lack of Clarity Around Ownership

In agile teams, blurred lines between developers, QA, and operations can lead to confusion about who owns uptime, alert responses, or system performance.

• Developers may release features without considering scalability or observability.
• On-call burdens may fall disproportionately on the SRE team.

Solution: Foster a culture of shared ownership by involving developers in on-call rotations, incident reviews, and performance monitoring. Use service-level objectives (SLOs) to define expectations for all stakeholders.

3. Siloed Communication and Tooling

Agile teams often use their own tools or processes, which may not integrate well with SRE workflows.

• Monitoring, logging, and alerting platforms may differ across teams.
• Important reliability concerns may be left out of sprint planning sessions.

Solution: SREs should embed into teams as reliability champions. Standardize observability tools and include non-functional requirements in planning meetings to ensure reliability concerns are prioritized.

4. Technical Debt and Toil Accumulation

Agile’s emphasis on delivering features quickly can lead to an accumulation of technical debt and operational toil—manual tasks that don’t scale.

• Scripts and tools may be patched together rather than engineered for long-term use.
• SREs may spend excessive time managing outages, deployments, or flaky alerts.

Solution: Track and measure toil. Use automation to eliminate repetitive tasks, and reserve time each sprint for tech debt reduction. Advocate for infrastructure as code and self-healing systems.

5. Scaling Systems Alongside Teams

As agile teams scale quickly, infrastructure often struggles to keep pace. This results in overloaded services, inefficient resource usage, and inconsistent reliability across environments.

• SREs may be pulled in multiple directions to support multiple squads.
• Shadow infrastructure or undocumented services can pose risks.

Solution: Adopt platform engineering principles. Create reusable infrastructure modules, enforce resource tagging, and document services thoroughly. Empower teams to deploy safely without bottlenecking SREs.

6. Burnout and On-Call Fatigue

Fast development cycles, frequent incidents, and inadequate tooling can lead to burnout, especially for small SRE teams managing complex systems.

• Alerts may be noisy, irrelevant, or unactionable.
• Weekend or after-hours incidents may become too common.

Solution: Tune alert thresholds, implement alert fatigue monitoring, and create playbooks for common incidents. Encourage a healthy on-call culture by sharing responsibility and tracking incident impact over time.

Final Thoughts

Agile and SRE can work hand-in-hand when both practices are implemented with collaboration and intention. By addressing challenges such as unclear ownership, technical debt, and unreliable releases, Site Reliability Engineers can help teams build systems that are not only fast, but also stable, observable, and resilient. In an agile world, reliability isn’t just a backend concern—it’s a team-wide responsibility, and SREs are key to making it work.