Introducing Database Reliability Engineering

Our goal with this lesson is to provide the guidance and framework for you, the reader, to grow on the path to being a truly excellent database reliability engineer (DBRE). When naming the lesson we chose to use the words reliability engineer, rather than administrator.

Ben Treynor, VP of Engineering at Google, says the following about reliability engineering:

fundamentally doing work that has historically been done by an operations team, but using engineers with software expertise, and banking on the fact that these engineers are inherently both predisposed to, and have the ability to, substitute automation for human labor.

Today’s database professionals must be engineers, not administrators. We build things. We create things. As engineers practicing devops, we are all in this together, and nothing is someone else’s problem. As engineers, we apply repeatable processes, established knowledge, and expert judgment to design, build, and operate production data stores and the data structures within. As database reliability engineers, we must take the operational principles and the depth of database expertise that we possess one step further.

If you look at the non-storage components of today’s infrastructures, you will see systems that are easily built, run, and destroyed via programmatic and often automatic means. The lifetimes of these components can be measured in days, and sometimes even hours or minutes. When one goes away, there ...