Keeping the service running to a level that customers demand is a high priority for everyone. Nobody wants to cut SRE to the point outages cause customers to leave.
But I think SRE is closer to "operations" in a traditional company (i.e. unavoidable to provide the service), rather than maintenance (something often deferred as long as possible).
In this framing maintenance is things like tech debt reduction, improving internal tools, experiment iteration time, etc, which is often undervalued relative to product impact IMO.
Keeping the service running to a level that customers demand is a high priority for everyone. Nobody wants to cut SRE to the point outages cause customers to leave.
But I think SRE is closer to "operations" in a traditional company (i.e. unavoidable to provide the service), rather than maintenance (something often deferred as long as possible).
In this framing maintenance is things like tech debt reduction, improving internal tools, experiment iteration time, etc, which is often undervalued relative to product impact IMO.