Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Foreword by Royal Hansen

For years, I’ve wished that someone would write a book like this. Since their publication, I’ve often admired and recommended the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) books—so I was thrilled to find that a book focused on security and reliability was already underway when I arrived at Google, and am only too happy to contribute in a small way to the process. Ever since I began working in the tech industry, across organizations of varying sizes, I’ve seen people struggling with the question of how security should be organized: Should it be centralized or federated? Independent or embedded? Operational or consultative? Technical or governing? The list goes on….

When the SRE model, and SRE-like versions of DevOps, became popular, I noticed that the problem space SRE tackles exhibits similar dynamics to security problems. Some organizations have combined these two disciplines into an approach called “DevSecOps.”

Both SRE and security have strong dependencies on classic software engineering teams. Yet both differ from classic software engineering teams in fundamental ways:

• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and security engineers tend to break and fix, as well as build.

• Their work encompasses operations, in addition to development.

• SREs and security engineers are specialists, rather than classic software engineers.

• They are often viewed as roadblocks, rather than enablers.

• They are frequently siloed, rather than integrated in product teams.

SRE created ...