Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

As a Google software engineer, I read this book largely from the perspective of better understanding the practices I've seen supporting the various services I've worked on over the years. As a SWE on a high traffic critical surface, I saw many of the best practices mentioned in this book develop. It was useful to see a snapshot of how they fit together with the broader (and itself evolving) SRE philosophy.

Although I found the philosophy most interesting, the bulk of the book was practical principles on how to run reliable services. Although many of the details are specific to Google, the general principles are not. The authors provided enough information on why certain practices worked well to allow others to make their own tradeoffs show more about what works in their environment.

Overall, this was an interesting and valuable read. show less

There's a ton of great information here, and we refer to it regularly as we're trying to change the culture at work. I gave it a 4 instead of a 5 because it does suffer a little from the style – think collection of essays rather than a unified arc – but it's really worth reading even if it requires some care to transfer to more usual environments.

This book contains a number of insights into Google's SRE practice. It is a bit repetitive at times but this assists in drilling in some of the key points.