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

Chapter 9. Networking Foundations

When I started as an SRE, one of the topics that I found most daunting, and incredibly hard to find good writing on, was networking. Networking is one of the most integral parts of our industry, though, because it is how communication happens between services. Without networking, we would not have distributed systems or the internet. I personally wouldn't be able to save copies of this book into Dropbox, while flying between New York and San Francisco, nor would I be able to work regularly with my editors in the United Kingdom and India. However, despite modern networking being wonderful, it also needs to be resilient to deal with physical problems that constantly occur, such as cables getting cut, weather interfering with wireless, and sharks destroying oceanic cables.

As we have highlighted throughout the book, communication between people is very important. We're moving toward a world of more distributed systems, which means that consistent and reliable...