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

Performance budgets


Another way you can improve the UX of a service is by defining a performance budget. We talked about performance budgets very briefly in Chapter 5, Testing and Releasing. The concept is that for every code change, you measure its effect on system performance. If performance changes enough to take the service out of valid bounds, you need to stop working on features until you modify the application to get performance back to normal levels.

In Chapter 6, Capacity Planning, we said that tying goals to performance is dangerous. We said that this is because making changes and knowing the performance impact is hard. Instead, by measuring performance constantly and seeing how changes made for features affect system-wide performance, your team can make a cost-benefit analysis to determine how much effort is needed to meet your performance goals.

Performance budgets were first introduced to me by Lara Hogan. Lara is a very distinguished engineering manager, the author of Designing...