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

Communication


Once someone has been alerted, and they have acknowledged or "ACK"ed an alert, they need to start communicating. My rule of thumb is that you should send a message, no matter what, to all stakeholders every 30 minutes. If nothing has changed, then tell them. Know your audience, so do not go too technical if you do not need to, but if your audience is technical, then share what you can, but keep it brief. If it is an internal communication, then make sure to tell people where to go if they need to know more:

Figure 11: Screenshot of an Imgix (an image CDN company) outage status page. It shows updates from the company to the public in reverse chronological order. The oldest message, at the bottom, is when it first notified the public about the outage, then five minutes later it provided an update. 20 minutes after that, it posted the final message saying the incident was over and had been resolved.

Outside of your 30-minute updates, explain what you're doing in your team chat so...