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

How to write a postmortem document


The incident has happened and you've decided to write a postmortem document. You have done your analysis. What do you put in it? My rough template tends to be as follows—summary, impact, timeline, root cause, action items, and appendix. As long as you capture the incident in detail, you can put whatever you want in a postmortem document. I usually aim for a few pages, but depending on how complicated the outage was, it may be as short as one or two pages or as long as 20. The following is the template I usually use as a starting point to help me to organize my thoughts. Staring at a template after (or during) analysis is a helpful framework compared to just looking at a blank page and debating what to write. There are many other templates available online and one repository of templates is at https://github.com/dastergon/postmortem-templates.

At the top of the document, add the names of those involved, the date of the incident and when the document was last...