Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale

Organizations—big and small—have started to realize just how crucial system and application reliability is to their business. At the same time, they’ve also learned just how difficult it is to maintain that reliability while iterating at the speed demanded by the marketplace. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a proven approach to this challenge.

SRE is a large and rich topic to discuss. Google led the way with Site Reliability Engineering, the wildly successful O’Reilly book that described Google’s creation of the discipline and the implementation that has allowed them to operate at a planetary scale. Inspired by that earlier work, this book explores a very different part of the SRE space.

The more than two dozen chapters in Seeking SRE bring you into some of the important conversations going on in the SRE world right now. Listen as engineers and other leaders in the field discuss different ways of implementing SRE and SRE principles in a wide variety of settings; how SRE relates to other approaches like DevOps; the specialities on the cutting edge that will soon be common place in SRE; best practices and technologies that make practicing SRE easier; and finally hear what people have to say about the important, but rarely discussed human side of SRE.

David N. Blank-Edelman is the book’s curator and editor.

Table of Contents

Part I. Sre Implementation
Chapter 1. Context Versus Control In Sre
Chapter 2. Interviewing Site Reliability Engineers
Chapter 3. So, You Want To Build An Sre Team?
Chapter 4. Using Incident Metrics To Improve Sre At Scale
Chapter 5. Working With Third Parties Shouldn’T Suck
Chapter 6. How To Apply Sre Principles Without Dedicated Sre Teams
Chapter 7. Sre Without Sre: The Spotify Case Study
Chapter 8. Introducing Sre In Large Enterprises
Chapter 9. From Sysadmin To Sre In 8,963 Words
Chapter 10. Clearing The Way For Sre In The Enterprise
Chapter 11. Sre Patterns Loved By Devops People Everywhere
Chapter 12. Devops And Sre: Voices From The Community
Chapter 13. Production Engineering At Facebook

Part II. Near Edge Sre
Chapter 14. In The Beginning, There Was Chaos
Chapter 15. The Intersection Of Reliability And Privacy
Chapter 16. Database Reliability Engineering
Chapter 17. Engineering For Data Durability
Chapter 18. Introduction To Machine Learning For Sre

Part III. Sre Best Practices And Technologies
Chapter 19. Do Docs Better: Integrating Documentation Into The Engineering Workflow
Chapter 20. Active Teaching And Learning
Chapter 21. The Art And Science Of The Service-Level Objective
Chapter 22. Sre As A Success Culture
Chapter 23. Sre Antipatterns
Chapter 24. Immutable Infrastructure And Sre
Chapter 25. Scriptable Load Balancers
Chapter 26. The Service Mesh: Wrangler Of Your Microservices?

Part IV. The Human Side Of Sre
Chapter 27. Psychological Safety In Sre
Chapter 28. Sre Cognitive Work
Chapter 29. Beyond Burnout
Chapter 30. Against On-Call: A Polemic
Chapter 31. Elegy For Complex Systems
Chapter 32. Intersections Between Operations And Social Activism
Chapter 33. Conclusion