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Is there a more digestible version of SRE concepts somewhere? I'm just looking for an easier way to communicate core principles and concepts to my team without

Is there a more digestible version of SRE concepts somewhere? I'm just looking for an easier way to communicate core principles and concepts to my team without asking them to sink into 500 pages?

dijit 7y ago
The books read quite easy. The first book is just stories from google; it doesn’t really prescribe anything- it’s a collection of people talking about what SRE means to them and also how it fits together with “devops”. The second book (the SRE workbook) is more prescriptive, walks through practical ways of implementing it. The most base description of SRE principles is simply that: 1) You automate aggressively and develop or use self-service tools as much as possible (over ops work) 2) you define what “availability” really means; institute an allowance of errors based on budget. Highly reliable systems should get much more attention and budget than lower requirement systems. Make an SLO dashboard; alert based on your “error budget” being eaten too quickly. 3) try to avoid allowing your staff to work more than 50% on operations work; that’s your indicator for being overloaded.
- lrem 7y ago
  Anecdata: some people disbelieve this ≤50% ops time figure. At the moment my SRE team is getting some flak for exceeding 30%, which exceeds the PA's guideline of 20% for the wrong reasons.
- gentleman11 7y ago
  If somebody was in a hurry, which sections of which book should they start with?
  - atmosx 7y ago
    Check out the YouTube videos on SRE by the Seth Vargo and friends at Google.
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    SRE Book (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html): Chapters 4, 5, 6, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, All the Appendixes SRE Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/ https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/): Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, All the Appendixes
collyw 7y ago
Shame you got downvoted for what seems a reasonable request.
sethvargo 7y ago
There's quite a few resources. Liz and I did a video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk and blog series: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-vs-devops-competing-standards-or-close-friends https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-vs-devops-com.... It's about 50min of content, but it's framed through a slightly different lens. There's also a coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/site-reliability-engineering-slos/introduction-sTYDX https://www.coursera.org/lecture/site-reliability-engineerin... Disclaimer: I work for Google
caseydm 7y ago
My favorite book on this topic is the DevOps Handbook. The author lays out a very clear and easy to follow path that gives you the same result: secure and reliable systems.
- gentleman11 7y ago
  I found the devops handbook was very wordy and was both not concrete enough, and also did not make its arguments as strongly as it could have. I wasn’t able to get into it
lonelappde 7y ago
Read one chapter, put it to work, repeat.
sciurus 7y ago
Just take an hour to watch the 2014 SRECon keynote from Ben Treynor. https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/technical-sessions/presentation/keys-sre https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/technical-session...
- pleddy 7y ago
  No
pleddy 7y ago
The first book's first 3 chapters are readable, then descends onto hell of manager talk, btw, despite Google talking heads. You're not crazy. This is blah blah mid and small companies do not need or want.

Is there a more digestible version of SRE concepts somewhere? I'm just looking for an easier way to communicate core principles and concepts to my team without asking them to sink into 500 pages?

dijit 7y ago

The books read quite easy. The first book is just stories from google; it doesn’t really prescribe anything- it’s a collection of people talking about what SRE means to them and also how it fits together with “devops”. The second book (the SRE workbook) is more prescriptive, walks through practical ways of implementing it. The most base description of SRE principles is simply that: 1) You automate aggressively and develop or use self-service tools as much as possible (over ops work) 2) you define what “availability” really means; institute an allowance of errors based on budget. Highly reliable systems should get much more attention and budget than lower requirement systems. Make an SLO dashboard; alert based on your “error budget” being eaten too quickly. 3) try to avoid allowing your staff to work more than 50% on operations work; that’s your indicator for being overloaded.

lrem 7y ago
Anecdata: some people disbelieve this ≤50% ops time figure. At the moment my SRE team is getting some flak for exceeding 30%, which exceeds the PA's guideline of 20% for the wrong reasons.
gentleman11 7y ago
If somebody was in a hurry, which sections of which book should they start with?
- atmosx 7y ago
  Check out the YouTube videos on SRE by the Seth Vargo and friends at Google.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  SRE Book (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html): Chapters 4, 5, 6, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, All the Appendixes SRE Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/ https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/): Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, All the Appendixes

collyw 7y ago

Shame you got downvoted for what seems a reasonable request.

sethvargo 7y ago

There's quite a few resources. Liz and I did a video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk and blog series: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-vs-devops-competing-standards-or-close-friends https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-vs-devops-com.... It's about 50min of content, but it's framed through a slightly different lens. There's also a coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/site-reliability-engineering-slos/introduction-sTYDX https://www.coursera.org/lecture/site-reliability-engineerin... Disclaimer: I work for Google

caseydm 7y ago

My favorite book on this topic is the DevOps Handbook. The author lays out a very clear and easy to follow path that gives you the same result: secure and reliable systems.

gentleman11 7y ago
I found the devops handbook was very wordy and was both not concrete enough, and also did not make its arguments as strongly as it could have. I wasn’t able to get into it

lonelappde 7y ago

Read one chapter, put it to work, repeat.

sciurus 7y ago

Just take an hour to watch the 2014 SRECon keynote from Ben Treynor. https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/technical-sessions/presentation/keys-sre https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/technical-session...

pleddy 7y ago
No

pleddy 7y ago

The first book's first 3 chapters are readable, then descends onto hell of manager talk, btw, despite Google talking heads. You're not crazy. This is blah blah mid and small companies do not need or want.