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

Architecture–where performance changes come from


One of the most consistent reasons for dramatic performance changes is changes in infrastructure. You can dive into the code and find bugs or do deep research on tuning, but more often than not, putting a cache in the right place or removing a dependency will change performance with orders of magnitude. A quick example would be taking a simple web application and adding a Content Distribution Network (CDN) in front of it. This allows for a global cache of content, reducing the load on your actual applications, assuming the content can actually be cached.

Figure 6: An architecture of a simple web app, before (left) and after adding a CDN (right)

Now, because of this significant change in performance, architecture decisions can also have a dramatic effect on capacity planning. It is highly recommended that you try and get involved in the planning stages for architecture changes. The reasons for this are twofold:

  1. You have deep knowledge of how the...