Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, 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 (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

What is incident response?


Incident response is responding to an incident that happens. A shocking revelation and wildly unpredictable definition, I know!

Incident response is usually a set of a few actions:

  • Noticing that something is not right

  • Communicating that something is not right

  • Doing something to make things right

Noticing comes through alerting. Sometimes that alert is like a 911 call—an SOS message from a human who has seen an error in your software. A human alert could come in the form of a text message from a friend, an email from a coworker, a ticket to a support system, or even a yell from across the room. Human escalations can be useful, but usually it is preferred to receive alerts from automated systems. Automated systems are preferred because, unlike humans, they are consistent and can be defined in a consistent manner. Humans will come up with new and unique ways to break your system. Automated systems will use your system consistently. When I say automated systems, I mean...