Real-World SRE: The Survival Guide for Responding to a System Outage and Maximizing Uptime

This hands-on survival manual will give you the tools to confidently prepare for and respond to a system outage.

Key Features

• Proven methods for keeping your website running
• A survival guide for incident response
• Written by an ex-Google SRE expert

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Monitor for approaching catastrophic failure
• Alert your team to an outage emergency
• Dissect your incident response strategies
• Test automation tools and build your own software
• Predict bottlenecks and fight for user experience
• Eliminate the competition in an SRE interview

Who this book is for

Real-World SRE is aimed at software developers facing a website crisis, or who want to improve the reliability of their company's software. Newcomers to Site Reliability Engineering looking to succeed at interview will also find this invaluable.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Monitoring
3. Incident Response
4. Postmortems
5. Testing & Releasing
6. Capacity Planning
7. Building Tools
8. User Experience
9. Networking Foundations
10. Linux And Cloud Foundations

Nat Welch is a software developer based in the US. Since 2005 he has been building websites and keeping them running. He has always had a deep love of infrastructure and building to support the creative efforts of others. In 2012, Nat became a Site Reliability Engineer at Google and fell in love with the specialty. Since then, he has worked at companies of all sizes trying to promote reliability and help developers build reliable systems.