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

Being on call


On-call life can be very stressful. The stress comes from not knowing what is going to happen, plus not being able to work on the projects that you actually enjoy. To make it a better experience for those involved, the following are some tips and general policies for keeping everyone happy:

  • When deciding who to alert, do not alert everyone unless you have less than three people to alert. If you alert everyone, then you are alerting no one. I say less than three because with one or two people, in a rotation that has a primary and a secondary, you both are always on call anyway. You can do a rotation, but it might be just as easy to alert you both. Once you have three people, then one person can have time off.

  • Make sure there is an on-call schedule and people know when they are the on-call person. People should know how long they will be on call and when they next need to be on call. Usually, it helps to have the next three months of on call scheduled, so that people know if they...