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

Seeing systems administration as multiple layers and multiple towers

SRE professionals follow a technical generalist model. By generalist, we meant to say they have deep knowledge of multiple technology domains. We saw in this chapter that they are also well versed in the processes and governance model that support IT operations and development. We will represent the site reliability engineering body of knowledge for systems and infrastructure management as a matrix.

Figure 6.2 – Matrixial IT systems and an infrastructure body of knowledge

Figure 6.2 – Matrixial IT systems and an infrastructure body of knowledge

You can see in Figure 6.2 that systems administration happens at any phase of the cloud adoption ladder, from traditional on-premises and cloud-hosted to cloud-enabled and cloud-native IT. Moreover, ITSM processes permeate not only IT models but also technology towers.

Conceptually speaking, a DevOps pipeline and its processes can be deployed to a traditional IT environment (mostly based on bare-metal and VM...