What programming languages should a Site Reliability Engineer know?

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are responsible for building and maintaining scalable, reliable, and efficient systems. While their role blends software engineering with operations, programming is at the core of what they do. SREs use programming languages to automate tasks, monitor infrastructure, write deployment tools, and troubleshoot complex system issues. Knowing the right languages enables SREs to work efficiently across distributed systems, CI/CD pipelines, cloud platforms, and incident response processes.

Why Programming Skills Are Crucial for SREs

SREs need to automate repetitive processes, build internal tools, and write scripts for monitoring, logging, and alerting. Strong programming fundamentals help SREs:

• Automate deployments, rollbacks, and scaling operations
• Write integrations with monitoring tools and APIs
• Debug production issues and analyze logs or metrics
• Build custom solutions when off-the-shelf tools fall short

While deep software engineering isn’t always required, fluency in scripting and systems programming is essential.

Top Programming Languages for Site Reliability Engineers

1. Python

Python is widely used for automation, scripting, and system integration. Its readability and large ecosystem make it ideal for building monitoring scripts, infrastructure tools, and CI/CD integrations. Many DevOps platforms and SDKs offer Python bindings, making it a go-to language for SREs.

2. Go (Golang)

Go is known for its concurrency support, fast performance, and ease of deployment—traits highly valued in infrastructure tooling. SREs often use Go to build microservices, cloud-native tools, and performance-critical agents. Many modern observability and orchestration tools (like Kubernetes and Prometheus) are written in Go.

3. Bash / Shell Scripting

For automating tasks at the OS level, shell scripting is indispensable. Bash is used to write deployment scripts, cron jobs, startup processes, and incident remediation workflows. It's especially important for SREs managing Linux-based systems.

4. JavaScript / TypeScript

SREs who work on full-stack applications or internal dashboards may encounter JavaScript or TypeScript. These are often used to write tools for real-time monitoring, alerting dashboards, or API interfaces for system health reporting.

5. Ruby

While less common today, Ruby is still used in legacy infrastructure and tools like Chef. Familiarity with Ruby is useful if your organization uses it for infrastructure as code (IaC) or configuration management.

6. Java

In enterprises or JVM-heavy environments, Java is used for backend systems. Understanding Java helps when debugging performance issues, tracing logs, or writing integrations with monitoring frameworks like JMX or Micrometer.

Bonus: YAML and JSON

These aren’t programming languages, but they are essential formats for configuring cloud resources, Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD workflows, and API interactions. SREs must be proficient in writing and debugging structured data in these formats.

Choosing the Right Language Based on Your Environment

• Cloud-native infrastructure: Focus on Go and YAML
• Legacy systems or monoliths: Add Java or Ruby knowledge
• Automation-heavy environments: Invest in Python and Bash
• Full-stack observability tools: Learn JavaScript/TypeScript

SREs often work in environments with a mix of tech stacks. The key is to become proficient in at least two languages—typically one for scripting (Python or Bash) and one for systems programming (Go or Java).

Final Thoughts

Programming is not optional for Site Reliability Engineers—it’s foundational. The right mix of languages enables SREs to move faster, build better tools, and respond to system failures with confidence. Whether you're building a custom alerting system or writing a script to remediate outages, your programming skills are what keep systems stable, efficient, and resilient.