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

Defining projects


Once you have your task or problem, you need to figure out how you are going to approach it. Personally, I start by writing down the problem in a notebook and start taking notes about what I do not know, what I do know, and how I might try and solve it. This research phase often involves searching online to figure out how other people have solved the problem, if there are any open source tools that people have already released that are in the problem space, or if no one else has this problem, why that is.

Evaluating other people's solutions teaches you about how this problem surfaces in different environments. It's also useful to figure out if a piece of open source software could solve your problem or nearly solve it. Every situation is different, but often you can find a software project that does 90% of what you want and you can either expand it or work with the maintainer to see if the software would work for your situation. All of this research will help to save you...