Book Image

Becoming a Rockstar SRE

By : Jeremy Proffitt, Rod Anami
Book Image

Becoming a Rockstar SRE

By: Jeremy Proffitt, Rod Anami

Overview of this book

Site reliability engineering is all about continuous improvement, finding the balance between business and product demands while working within technological limitations to drive higher revenue. But quantifying and understanding reliability, handling resources, and meeting developer requirements can sometimes be overwhelming. With a focus on reliability from an infrastructure and coding perspective, Becoming a Rockstar SRE brings forth the site reliability engineer (SRE) persona using real-world examples. This book will acquaint you the role of an SRE, followed by the why and how of site reliability engineering. It walks you through the jobs of an SRE, from the automation of CI/CD pipelines and reducing toil to reliability best practices. You’ll learn what creates bad code and how to circumvent it with reliable design and patterns. The book also guides you through interacting and negotiating with businesses and vendors on various technical matters and exploring observability, outages, and why and how to craft an excellent runbook. Finally, you’ll learn how to elevate your site reliability engineering career, including certifications and interview tips and questions. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to identify and measure reliability, reduce downtime, troubleshoot outages, and enhance productivity to become a true rockstar SRE!
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Part 1 - Understanding the Basics of Who, What, and Why
5
Part 2 - Implementing Observability for Site Reliability Engineering
10
Part 3 - Applying Architecture for Reliability
16
Part 4 - Mastering the Outage Moments
20
Part 5 - Looking into Future Trends and Preparing for SRE Interviews

What makes a good runbook – the basics

Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m personally not a fan of runbooks. I just haven’t found a better tool to make the knowledge I need available to me instantaneously during an outage. For me, it’s a struggle between wanting to be the type of engineer who can walk into an outage and in minutes resolve the issue and knowing the truth – I’m not always as good as I think I am or want to be. And that is the most honest reason why we need runbooks.

One of the strong characteristics most rockstar engineers have is the ability to solve problems and find a path to resolution quickly – whether in an obscure compiler error or the highest priority outages. We leverage this power to quickly determine cause and remediations, but imagine if we had the article with the answer bookmarked – how much time would that save? That is the strength of the runbook – it’s a singular answer to...