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

Messaging customers and leadership

I will tell you from experience: I’ve definitely learned my lesson about messaging! Especially about messages to leadership and people outside of the technical organization. We’ll talk about not only what messaging to send but how often, and the wisdom that not everything needs to be carried beyond your own boss or to be publicly announced.

Customer versus leadership messaging

I am a firm believer that the technology department in general should not craft the message to customers. Why? Technologists are not known for being the best communicators and they certainly don’t spend their day being concerned about the brand and customer relationships. The PR and marketing departments are experts in understanding what the issue is, analyzing the impact on the customer, and then ensuring the message, if any, is communicated properly to the customer.

This is the same when it comes to executives! We can typically say something to...