Scaling Reliability the Smart Way: The Consulting SRE Model

In earlier posts, we explored the Kitchen Sink Model, the Infrustructure Model and the Embedded Model of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Today, we turn our focus to another impactful approach: the Consulting Model. This model is designed to scale SRE knowledge across an organization — without embedding SREs in every single team or giving them direct responsibility for production systems.

The Consulting Model is about knowledge transfer over direct implementation. Instead of writing or deploying production code, consulting SRE teams advise other teams on reliability best practices, system design, operational readiness, and incident management.

These SREs act more like internal experts or coaches, helping developers adopt reliable engineering practices and avoid common pitfalls. Their tools include design reviews, reliability checklists, reliability playbooks, and performance consultations — rather than monitoring dashboards or CI/CD pipelines.

Google, which pioneered many modern SRE practices, notes that consulting teams are often brought in for major product launches or architecture changes to provide guidance without assuming operational responsibility themselves (source).

Here’s how a typical SRE consultation might go.

One or two SREs study the product architecture, service-level objectives (SLOs), and deployment plans.

They meet with the development team to discuss risks, reliability targets, observability strategies, and incident preparedness.

SREs provide feedback, propose changes, and share proven reliability patterns—often pointing teams to documented best practices or reference architectures.

The SREs then step back, allowing the development team to implement recommendations on their own. This allows a small consulting group to scale its impact across dozens of teams.

Limited Context. Without day-to-day involvement, SREs may lack deep understanding of team-specific constraints, leading to overly generic advice.

Credibility Gaps. Developers may hesitate to trust advisors who aren’t “in the trenches” with them or directly responsible for outcomes.

Knowledge Decay. Without strong documentation and follow-up, advice may be forgotten or inconsistently applied.

The Agile Analytics platform plays a key role in making consulting SREs more effective. It combines:

This gives SRE consultants the context they need to deliver relevant, high-impact advice. Teams see faster improvement because suggestions are backed by real data — not guesswork.

The consulting model works best when:

Google suggests this model as a starting point before building a full SRE team or embedding engineers into every product team.

The Consulting SRE Model offers a pragmatic path to reliability at scale. It’s not about who owns the code —it’s about who shares the knowledge. When combined with tools like Agile Analytics, this model ensures that every team can level up their practices without SREs becoming bottlenecks or gatekeepers.

For organizations looking to improve reliability while preserving developer autonomy, this model offers both flexibility and efficiency.