Platform Engineering vs. SRE vs. DevOps: Practical Differences for Java Teams

You've probably been in that hallway conversation (or Teams/Zoom meeting) where DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering all get thrown around. Sometimes these words are used interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. Sometimes they indicate different aspects, but nobody really agrees on what they are.

If you can relate, know that you're not alone. That's why we decided to walk through the core differences (and overlaps) of what each term means for us at Payara. 

There’s an interesting active Reddit thread on r/devops where people are trying to sketch out the “Venn diagram” of DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering. And the responses are pretty diverse, because the lines can be blurry. But if you're leading a dev team, these disciplines aren’t just abstract concepts. In fact, they define how infrastructure gets built, how applications get shipped as well as how development and operations teams should operate.

DevOps: Fostering Collaboration and Automation

At its core, DevOps a philosophy from the software world that originates from Agile and lean practices. The term was coined in 2009 to define a bridging between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) that would break down silos in an organization in order to support incremental development and rapid delivery of software. To achieve this, a specific methodology and IT culture needs to be in place. 

A DevOps approach integrates teams to optimize the efficiency, speed and security of software development as well as its delivery through a culture of accountability, improved collaboration and joint responsibility. In practice, this involves the creation of a highly cooperative mindset that helps developers and operation teams to work together to build, test, release and monitor applications. When it comes to the necessary technologies, the three pillars of DevOps are automation, continuous integration (CI) of code changes into the main branch, and continuous delivery (CD) with regular application releases. 

Top DevOps tools:

• Jenkins

• Terraform, Ansible

• Prometheus, Grafana

SRE: Apply a "Softwareist" Approach to Operations Management 

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a concept that was born at Google in 2003, i.e. when DevOps didn't exist yet, to help teams stop pulling in opposite directions and, instead, enable them to work towards the same goals and drive success, i.e. reliability, scalability and performance. In fact, R&D was focusing on creating new features and pushing them to production, while the operations team was trying to keep production as stable as possible.

It's clear that SRE was set up to address similar challenges in production operation management to those that drove the development and popularization of DevOps. That's why DevOps and SRE have similar (albeit not identical) methodologies and goals. For example, while eliminating barriers between development and operations is the main driver of DevOps, for SRE this is mainly a mean to drive the broad scale application of software engineering to infrastructure and operations in order to improve performance and efficiency.

In practice: DevOps asks: "How can we ship faster?" while SRE asks: "How can we make sure the system works better in production?"

Top SRE tools:

• Opsgenie

• Grafana

• PagerDuty

• Chaos Monkey

Platform Engineering: Developer Enablement at Scale

Just like DevOps and SRE, Platform Engineering emerged as a direct response to key challenges faced by tech organizations. Specifically, it aims to address the difficulty of scaling digital infrastructure by building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that abstract away complexity, automate operations, standardize software delivery and enhance the developer experience. The goal is to drive developer enablement and productivity, giving teams self-service tooling that helps them concentrate on advancing code without having to spend time on issues about how to run the software at scale.

As such Platform Engineering and IDPs are complementary to DevOps and SRE, as they provide tools that make it easier for development and operations team to reach DevOps/SRE goals and objectives. Automation, standardized templates and opinionated solutions are key technologies that Platform Engineering relies on. Ideally, these should work out of the box while remaining customizable when needed.

In practice: DevOps asks: "How can we ship faster?", SRE asks: "How can we make sure the system works better in production?" and Platform Engineering asks: "What can help DevOps and SRE succeed?"

Top Platform Engineering tools:

• Terraform
• Arquillian
• Payara's Cloud-Native Deployment Platforms, such as Payara Qube

TL;DR Summary

• DevOps is about breaking silos to speed up high-quality deployments within Agile frameworks 
• SRE is about improving software and break silos
• Platform Engineering is about developer productivity and experience

How DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering Work Together

DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering are separate concepts but they aren’t mutually exclusive and can be combined to help teams work better and deliver high-quality results. Even more, often they are most effective when working together. In practice, how these roles and approaches come together depends on the size, maturity and priorities of an organization. However, the need for standardization, productivity and developer-friendly infrastructure is universal.

This is where organizations like Payara offer value, as we provide tools that support all three disciplines. For example, Payara Qube can serve Platform Engineering goals by offering pre-built environments and automation for cloud-native Java deployments. At the same time, it aligns with DevOps principles through seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines and supports SRE priorities by promoting consistent, observable and repeatable deployments.

By reducing the operational burden on developers and making deployment infrastructure more accessible and reliable, Payara helps unify these roles into a cohesive delivery model. Teams can ship faster, recover from failures more reliably and build on a standardized platform designed to scale.