r/sre: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

Posts assume you already carry a pager. Terms like p95, canary, error budget, RTO and burn rate are used without explanation, and questions come with a stack attached. The rules ban the entry-level questions outright and send them to the wiki, so a post pitched below the level is removed or gets a one-line answer.

• Working SREs and platform engineers asking how other teams handle disaster recovery, canaries, alerting and observability stacks.
• Senior engineers weighing a career move: startup versus big company, operations versus platform work.
• Students and early-career engineers asking for resume feedback or whether SRE is a good bet.
• Founders and employees of observability and incident tooling companies, some disclosed, some not.
• Open-source authors sharing projects, mainly in the weekly FOSS Friday thread.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/sre.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up86%
• Removed by Reddit's filters7%
• Removed by moderators6%
• Deleted by the author2%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up

97%

Removed by Reddit's filters

3%

Removed by moderators

0%

Period

September 2025 to August 2026

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   Be Civil

   Be civil.

2. 2

   Limit Posts to Topics Pertaining to SRE

   Posts must be pertaining to SRE or _highly_ of interest to SREs.

3. 3

   There are Better Places for Troubleshooting Posts

   There are better places for troubleshooting posts. Specific container or Linux issues should probably be taken to those subs, though we'd be happy to help with system design issues here.

4. 4

   Job Postings Must Include a Description and Salary

   Job postings must be for valid SRE roles and must include (or link directly to) both a full job description and salary information.

5. 5

   Prohibited Posts

   Posts asking "how to become an SRE" or for interview prep advice are not allowed. Please see our wiki for resources answering these common questions.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/sre has under 60,000 members and about five posts a day. It is quieter and more senior than the bigger infrastructure subreddits. The typical thread is a text post describing a real operational problem and asking how others deal with it, and it gets around nine or ten comments. Comments are longer than usual for Reddit, about 37 words at the median, and read like colleagues answering from experience.

The recurring subjects are incidents and on-call, observability stacks, disaster recovery testing, canary rollouts and runbooks. A second strand is careers: job outlook, resume roasts, and long personal posts about leaving a stable job. Those career threads draw some of the biggest comment counts in the sample, and the replies are frank about money, family and risk.

The fault line is AI in incident response. Members will argue about it at length when the post is an opinion or a lesson. Posts that announce an AI tool that investigates or fixes incidents, or that ask whether such a tool would be useful, turn up repeatedly among the moderator removals. Moving off an expensive commercial observability vendor to an open-source stack is the other topic that reliably fills a thread.

What lands

• Open questions any practitioner can answer from experience. The top recent post asked which book from outside the field made people better at the job.
• A specific production story with numbers, such as a slow checkout request where most of the latency turned out to be retries.
• Migration and tooling decisions with your current stack and constraints spelled out, like whether to stay on one metrics backend or move to another.
• Career threads with real detail: years of experience, the offer on the table, what worries you.
• A short, opinionated take on runbooks, alerting or AI in operations, posted as a discussion or a blog link with a summary.

What gets removed or ignored

• AI incident tool pitches, including the soft version that asks whether an AI that investigates incidents would be useful.
• Survey-style questions that ask the whole industry for its biggest pain point. They read as product research and get pulled.
• Content that is not about SRE: general developer news, offshore team advice, a consumer app outage, a personal job announcement.
• Listicles and tutorial videos, such as a roundup of editor extensions or a how-to video for building a monitoring stack.
• Job posts without a description and salary, and questions on how to become an SRE or prepare for interviews.

The unwritten rules

• Say who you work for. Posts that open with a disclosure, then ask a real question, stayed up. Questions that look like product research with no disclosure are among the removals.
• Open-source projects have a home in the weekly FOSS Friday thread. Its text bars commercial products, including ones with a free version, and AI-written comments.
• Bring the stack and the numbers. Questions that name the tools, the scale and what has been tried get real answers.
• Links are rare in comments, about 4% carry one. Dropping your product link into a reply is noticed.
• Scores are low across the board. The best post in the sample reached about 100 points, so judge a post by the replies.

Self-promotion

The written rules say nothing direct about self-promotion beyond staying on topic. The detail lives in the weekly FOSS Friday thread, which invites new and updated open-source projects and rules out commercial advertisements, including commercial products with a free version. In practice the mods remove tool launches and thinly disguised market research, while blog links with a real technical point and vendor employees who disclose their employer and ask an honest question are left alone. A few standalone project posts do stay up, but the thread is the safer route.

How people write here

Typical post length

130 words

Typical title length

10 words

Titles phrased as a question

29%

Typical comment length

37 words

Comments that include a link

4%

Posts that carry a flair

47%

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/sre.

• sre 120 posts
• incident 82 posts
• observability 61 posts
• production 82 posts
• sres 23 posts
• kubernetes 42 posts
• incidents 41 posts
• team 86 posts
• traces 34 posts
• grafana 24 posts
• engineering 57 posts
• logs 45 posts
• infrastructure 50 posts
• reliability 34 posts
• datadog 22 posts
• monitoring 41 posts
• devops 34 posts
• prometheus 17 posts
• cloud 46 posts
• terraform 24 posts
• on-call 19 posts
• teams 49 posts
• alert 30 posts
• sre role 14 posts
• incident response 20 posts
• tools 63 posts
• aws 36 posts
• metrics 29 posts
• infra 23 posts
• platform engineering 15 posts
• platform 48 posts
• distributed 21 posts
• updated open-source 10 posts
• sre-related open-source 10 posts
• project welcome 10 posts
• includes commercial 10 posts
• heavy interest 10 posts
• generated comments 10 posts
• friday share 10 posts
• foss version 10 posts

Recurring topics: SRE, prod, ai, devops, incident, production, management, infrastructure, observability.

Growth

1. 20131
2. 20141
3. 20157
4. 201618
5. 2017185
6. 2018788
7. 20192.3k
8. 20205.5k
9. 202112k
10. 202322k
11. 202432k
12. 202545k
13. 202658k

Related subreddits

• r/devops
• r/platform_engineering
• r/platformengineering
• r/Cloud
• r/devopsish
• r/ITCareerQuestions
• r/Backend
• r/CyberSecurityJobs
• r/k8s
• r/msp

Common questions