The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE

In 2016, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book ignited an industry discussion on what it means to run production services today—and why reliability considerations are fundamental to service design. Now, Google engineers who worked on that bestseller introduce The Site Reliability Workbook, a hands-on companion that uses concrete examples to show you how to put SRE principles and practices to work in your environment.

This new workbook not only combines practical examples from Google’s experiences, but also provides case studies from Google’s Cloud Platform customers who underwent this journey. Evernote, The Home Depot, The New York Times, and other companies outline hard-won experiences of what worked for them and what didn’t.

Dive into this workbook and learn how to flesh out your own SRE practice, no matter what size your company is.

You’ll learn:

• How to run reliable services in environments you don’t completely control—like cloud
• Practical applications of how to create, monitor, and run your services via Service Level Objectives
• How to convert existing ops teams to SRE—including how to dig out of operational overload
• Methods for starting SRE from either greenfield or brownfield

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. How SRE Relates to DevOps

Part I. Foundations
Chapter 2. Implementing SLOs
Chapter 3. SLO Engineering Case Studies
Chapter 4. Monitoring
Chapter 5. Alerting on SLOs
Chapter 6. Eliminating Toil
Chapter 7. Simplicity

Part II. Practices
Chapter 8. On-Call
Chapter 9. Incident Response
Chapter 10. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
Chapter 11. Managing Load
Chapter 12. Introducing Non-Abstract Large System Design
Chapter 13. Data Processing Pipelines
Chapter 14. Configuration Design and Best Practices
Chapter 15. Configuration Specifics
Chapter 16. Canarying Releases

Part III. Processes
Chapter 17. Identifying and Recovering from Overload
Chapter 18. SRE Engagement Model
Chapter 19. SRE: Reaching Beyond Your Walls
Chapter 20. SRE Team Lifecycles
Chapter 21. Organizational Change Management in SRE

Appendix A. Example SLO Document
Appendix B. Example Error Budget Policy
Appendix C. Results of Postmortem Analysis