Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Alerting


Alerting is a contentious topic. It is contentious because no one wants to be alerted. An alert is a queue that requires you to work, so if an alert is implemented poorly, or without thought, it can quickly disrupt your life and sour your relationship with a project. It is such a common problem that almost every field, company, and person has an opinion on the topic. Doctors have policies that state how long they can work for, along with when and how they can be paged. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States has requirements for pilots and many countries keep a close eye on the health of their military units that work in high-stress situations.

Note

Being paged is an old but common term. It refers to the act of someone trying to alert you. It comes from the days when, when someone was oncall, they carried a physical device, called a pager, that would display a phone number you needed to call and make noise, so you knew you had to do something.

As we have become...