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.
Author(s): Nat Welch
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 340
Cover
Copyright
Mapt upsell
Contributors
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 - Introduction
A brief history
What is SRE?
What is in the book?
SRE as a framework for new projects
Summary
References
Chapter 2 - Monitoring
Why monitoring?
Instrumenting an application
What should we measure?
A short introduction to SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Service levels
Error budgets
Collecting and saving monitoring data
Polling applications
Nagios
Prometheus
Cacti
Sensu
Push applications
StatsD
Telegraf
ELK
Displaying monitoring information
Arbitrary queries
Graphs
Dashboards
Chatbots
Managing and maintaining monitoring data
Communicating about monitoring
Do they even know there is monitoring?
References and related reading
Future reading
Summary
Chapter 3 - Incident Response
What is an incident?
What is incident response?
Alerting
When do you alert?
How do you alert?
Alerting services
What is in an alert?
Who do you alert?
Being on call
Communication
Incident Command System (ICS)
Where do you communicate?
Recovering the system
Calling all clear
Summary
Chapter 4 - Postmortems
What is a postmortem?
Why write a postmortem?
When to write a postmortem document
Carrying out incident analysis
How to write a postmortem document
Summary
Impact
Timeline
Root cause
Action items
Postmortems without action items
Appendix
Blameless postmortems
Holding a postmortem meeting
Analyzing past postmortems
MTTR and MTBF
Alert fatigue
Discussing past outages
Summary
References
Chapter 5 - Testing and Releasing
Testing
What do you test?
Testing code
Testing infrastructure
Testing processes
Releasing
When to release
Releasing to production
Validating your release
Rollbacks
Automation
Continuous everything
Summary
Chapter 6 - Capacity Planning
A quick introduction to business finance
Why plan?
Managing risk and managing expectations
Defining a plan
What is our current capacity?
When are we going to run out of capacity?
How should we change our capacity?
State and concurrency
Is your service limited by another service?
Scaling for events
Unpredictable growth–user-generated content
Preplanned versus autoscaling
Delivering
Execute the plan
Architecture–where performance changes come from
Tech as a profit center and procurement
Summary
Chapter 7 - Building Tools
Finding projects
Defining projects
RDD
Example
Design documents
Planning projects
Example
Retrospectives and standups
Allocation
Building projects
Advice for writing code
Separation of concerns
Long-term work
Example OKRs
Notebooks
Documenting and maintaining projects
Summary
Chapter 8 - User Experience
An introduction to design and UX
Real-world interaction design
User testing
Picking an experience
Designing the test
Finding people to test
Developer experience
Experience of tools
Performance budgets
Security
Authentication
Authorization
Risk profile
Phishing
ACM code of ethics
Summary
References
Chapter 9 - Networking Foundations
The internet
Sending an HTTP request
DNS
dig
Ethernet and TCP/IP
Ethernet
IP
CIDR notation
ICMP
UDP
TCP
HTTP
curl and wget
Tools for watching the network
netstat
nc
tcpdump
Summary
Chapter 10 - Linux and Cloud Foundations
Linux fundamentals
Everything is a file
Files, directories, and inodes
Sockets
Devices
/proc
Filesystem layout
What is a process?
Zombies
Orphans
What is nice?
syscalls
How to trace
Watching processes
Build your own
Cloud fundamentals
VMs
Containers
Load balancing
Autoscaling
Storage
Queues and Pub/Sub
Units of scale
Example architecture interview
Summary
References
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index
