Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems 1st Edition

It's worth noting that there is a great Coursera course about SRE from Google. It will not cover as much as the book, but's it is a distilled version to learn the basics.This book has a lot of great information, which I found invaluable over the years. One of the harder thing for growing organizations is to keep teams focused, and I've seen that DevOps and SRE practices help to zero in on what is essential.A lot of Automation related work feels like 'yak shaving,' which is a term to refer to entirely unrelated things that don't add value to our product. For development teams, this feels very frustrating. Why would I want to make a script to automate this? We only use it once a year!SRE helps to solve these frustrations, to some extent, with practices that help organizations understand why should they communicate, why should they talk about issues, and why we measure some things on some level and not others.

I was amazed by the depth of this book, and the way it covers several aspects of what it takes to operate a complex and distributed software system. I was particularly impressed with the details of some chapters related to monitoring, load balancing (at the front end and back end), designing applications to manage overload conditions, and being on call.I think the book has a lot to teach and inspire. Some of the approaches described are very counterintuitive like the error budget, and the blameless postmortem culture. One of the shortcomings I noticed was that some chapters are hard to read because they treat rather advanced topics. The fact that the book has very few illustrations makes it hard to understand some of the concepts at times. Overall, an invaluable resource.

The really liked this book. Cool to see how Google actually runs things at their scale. Got me thinking about things I never thought about when it comes to my work in tech. This could sound like the book makes you paranoid, but I think that's too negative. I felt more like I now have a little license and education on how things can (and will) fail and how I can better prepare for and mitigate them. It's like you got to do a ride along in a busy Ambulance service, gets you thinking "hmm, maybe I should take that CPR course and brush up on the heimlich maneuver...".Even though several of the topics covered weren't things I deal with day to day, I think the mindset you develop after seeing how they solve various issues applies to most any IT / tech endeavor (i.e. whether you're in ops, a SWE, etc.). I think if this book's subject interests you at all, you'll really appreciate having read it.

First off - it's worth noting that Google lets you read this entire book for free on their website.I bought the Kindle version anyways because I spend enough time in front of a backlit screen that it seemed worth it to read something this large using a device that's better on your eyes. Unfortunately the Kindle version is formatted terribly and I wish I'd bought the print version instead. The book is broken up into Parts which are broken up into Chapters which are further broken up into headlined sections. The Kindle version identifies those headlined sections as chapters which is somewhat useless.Anyways, the first few chapters aren't especially useful unless you work at Google. They mostly discuss what's unique about Google's computing infrastructure. Despite this, they were EASILY my favorite part of the book because the material is so interesting and their approach is so unique. After that, each chapter is written in a way that it can stand on its own if you aren't reading the entire book, or are reading it out of order. This is convenient for people who want to pick and choose what parts they want to read, but means that people who are reading the entire thing wind up getting a lot of the same information multiple times. It's all written by different people too, which on the one hand makes it not quite as repetitive, but on the other hand makes it hard to just skim over the sections with info you already have because you don't recognize it as information you already know until you've processed it.Overall this is a fantastic book on DevOps, SRE, and current trends in the industry, It's a great read for anyone who wants to apply some "best practices" to their role. I would however say that reading the entire thing is overkill for most people and not necessarily the best use of your time if you have other things you'd like to be learning as well.Part 1 - Fascinating read. I imagine this would be a good overview if you're about to start at Google and want a sneak peek at how things are done, but I'm only speculating this as an outsider.Part 2 - Interesting and useful concepts for modern cloud computing.Part 3 - Some useful info and a lot of stuff that's not really unique to Google in my experience. Read the parts that you think you could use some improvement on, skip the rest.Part 4 - A condensed view from a managerial perspective of things you already read in Part 3.Part 5 - Some case studies, comparisons from other businesses, a useless recap, and examples that could be useful to share using the website version of the book if you're trying to explain to your team what new concepts are being implemented.

I think Googles practices are now standard across the industry. A lot of things mentioned in the book are already in practice at my employ. Good read.

Tons of nuggets about best practices, how they can be useful across industry, Google's tooling, how they got there, challenges faced, communication between engineers and SRE, how to look at problems, and so much more.There were parts of the book that got can be too deep or not best explained, and end up boring. I just skipped pages to move on to the next learning.Overall a good addition to my library.

This was a great deep dive into a style of delivery that everyone developing modern software must consider.There is a large portion of the book that is Googlecentric, but is required to understand their path to this construct.I felt a large injustice was done by not addressing the hit or miss mentality of custom engineering. What to buy vs build. At the scale of Google build was almost always better than buy, however, that is rarely true in the real world (or at least is rarely perceived as true).