Seeking SRE

Introduction

David N. Blank-Edelman, curator/editor

And So It Begins...

Conversations. That’s the most important word in the title of this book, so pardon the lack of subtlety I’m demonstrating by making it the first and last word of this book.

Why is it so important? That’s where the “Seeking” part of Seeking SRE comes in. The people I respect in the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) field all believe that the field itself is still evolving, expanding, changing, and being discovered. We are all in some sense still seeking SRE.

In my experience, fields like ours grow best when the people in that field—the actual practitioners—talk to one another. Bring people together, let them talk, argue, laugh, share their experiences (success and failures) and their unsolved problems. A smart, kind, diverse, inclusive, and respectful community in conversation can catalyze a field like nothing else.

Origin Story

It was at SREcon16 Europe, one of the gatherings of the SRE community, that this book was born. (Full disclosure: I’m one of the cofounders of SREcon.) Brian Anderson, the original O’Reilly editor for this book, was on the hunt. The splendid book by Google called Site Reliability Engineering had recently met with much-deserved commercial success and the publisher was on the lookout for more SRE content to publish. He and I were talking about the possibilities during a break when I realized what didn’t exist for SRE. There was no volume I knew of that could bring people into some ...