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Read this, even if you are far away from any actual operation of the systems you work on. Read it especially then. Learning the princples and philosophy conve
by jupp0r 3y ago
Read this, even if you are far away from any actual operation of the systems you work on. Read it especially then.
Learning the princples and philosophy conveyed in that book helped me tremendously in my career (as a software engineer). Thanks people at Google for writing and open sourcing it.
- hrpnk 3y agoThe important bit to remember when reading is to understand the origin (why) of the concepts. I've seen Engineers being too dogmatic about the book, saying that "Google does it this way" and not being able to apply the concepts to one's own organizational context. Even at Google, there will be different teams who will deviate from the "described process" given their business context, setup, or stakeholders.
- jeffbee 3y ago> Even at Google, there will be different teams who will deviate from the "described process" given their business context, setup, or stakeholders. Seriously. A lot of the book was influenced by Social SRE who had opinions all out of proportion to their own importance and success. At the time, there was some doubt about whether Social's pet theories belonged in the book, considering the varying practices and beliefs of other SRE groups supporting products that people actually use. This is related to my rule that anybody can title their doc "Best Practices" even if nobody subscribes to them.
- esafak 3y agoCan you name a better book?
- jeffbee 3y agoNone off the top of my head but for the engineering topics in Part III I think it pays to read them as historical background material, then read the last decade of conference papers, talks, and articles. Example: the section on backend subsetting in distributed systems is not current. If you wanted the current Google practice you need to read "Reinventing Backend Subsetting at Google"[1], and there are other interesting publications from other organizations. 1: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3570937 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3570937
- brandall10 3y agoCan you please expound on what Social SRE is? Is some public handle of an engineer, a name for an internal group, or something else?
- bananapub 3y agothe SRE teams that worked around various Google "Social" [media] products
- shanemhansen 3y agoI wasn't around Google when the book was written but after having read it and then managing a SRE team at Google my takeaway was: the book was not a documentary on how SRE works day to day. It was a loose collection of aspirational essays and fun historical stories. The reason those stories were so fun is because they are in fact still pretty unusual.