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

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction, explores the relatively new SRE field and outlines the practical framework of the book.

Chapter 2, Monitoring, talks about the tools and methodologies used when monitoring. After this chapter, a good experiment for you would be to set up monitoring on services, even if they are just fake services written for testing, and see if you can see how they change over time.

Chapter 3, Incident Response, explains how to respond to outages, and preparing your team for the worst. We also focus on setting up on-call rotations best practices around working together as a team and on building processes to make incidents as low stress as possible.

Chapter 4, Postmortems, takes you through the act of writing a postmortem and promoting reviews for yourself, your team, and your organization. We talk about data to collect, along with communication and how to track future work.

Chapter 5, Testing and Releasing, reviews common practices around testing and releasing.

Chapter 6, Capacity Planning, goes over some of the basics of finance and talks about how to build a plan for your infrastructure growth over time.

Chapter 7, Building Tools, discusses how to write software in a role focused on responsiveness. We also explore how to find new projects to work on, how to define those projects, and how to plan them. We then talk about execution and the long-term maintenance of software and how to be reflective on the work you have done.

Chapter 8, User Experience, gives an overview of the basics of user experience and user testing. We also talk about security and performance budgets.

Chapter 9, Networking Foundations, helps you to dive into the basics of networking.

Chapter 10, Linux and Cloud Foundations, covers the basics of Linux and common cloud services.