Becoming SRE

Appendix A. Letters to a Young SRE (Apologies to Rilke)

Once upon a time, when I published Seeking SRE, I asked people in the various SRE spaces I knew if they wanted to contribute to a crowdsourced chapter on SRE versus DevOps, and the response was phenomenal.

For this book, I thought it might be cool to ask the collective wisdom if they had any tips for new SREs or orgs new to SRE that they would want to pass on, knowing what they do now.

I specifically asked, “In two paragraphs (ideally) or less, what advice would you give to either individuals or organizations just starting on the road to SRE? What do you wish your future self could have told you? Things to pay attention to, things that aren’t as important as they may seem, practices you wish you started earlier, resources you have found helpful, lessons you learned, and so on.”

I’m very grateful for people’s willingness to share their experiences for this book. Here are their submissions (names and titles printed just as they were submitted to me):

John Amori

You’ll find that not all systems were designed as elegantly as you would have hoped, and even more are outside of your control to improve. It’s important to remember that you can’t do everything and, despite your best efforts, things will always eventually break. It’s here that I’ll impart this wisdom: “Be prepared.” It’s a simple enough thing to consider but difficult in practice to have great up-to-date documentation with clear, actionable tasks that consider every ...