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

The internet


The internet is a constantly evolving system. When I say internet, I mean the global network of cables, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), routers, switches, and computers that let all of us communicate. There are cables on poles, underground, underwater, hanging between buildings, inside buildings, and really anywhere you can shove a cable.

Figure 1: A map of all submarine cables from submarinecablemap.com in 2018

Some countries have one ISP, while others have hundreds. In some countries, the government owns the cables, while in others they are owned by private businesses. Many places do not have any cables and receive all of their internet via wireless from long-distance towers or from satellites.

Often, when people try to draw a graph to describe the internet, they draw something looking like a complete bipartite graph, where every node connects to every other node. Instead, it's more like a city sewer system—lots of trees and graphs connecting to large pipes that connect to...