Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. Data Management

By John Tobin and Victoria Wang

with Garrett Holthaus

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 16th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Data Management is the process of managing the data that your users and the company have entrusted to you, in an ethical and legal manner, while enabling your company to deliver services and value to your users. Data is one of your company’s most valuable assets and needs to be treated with appropriate safeguards and respect.

Many companies don’t think sufficiently about data management until something goes wrong, but like closing the door after the horse has bolted, it’s too late to start caring about it. Failures in data management are categorically different from other types of failures because remediation is so much harder, and frequently impossible. Data loss is permanent if you don’t have working backups, and data security breaches can’t be undone once the data has been exfiltrated. The trust and reputational damage of data loss or a data security breach is immense, takes years to restore, and your trust ...