Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Platform Engineering in SRE

By Chris Jones and Christof Leng

with David Grizzanti and James Brookbank

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 18th 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].

A system’s lifecycle—from conception to retirement—occurs in an ecosystem, not in a vacuum: it communicates with other systems; it runs on top of another system; is monitored by a system; and so on.¹ Indeed, understanding and changing the relationships between systems, and even the connections within each system, is a large part of an SRE’s work.²

A production platform is an organization’s abstraction layer for its collection of infrastructure: inter-system communication, continuous integration & deployment (CI/CD), observability, orchestration, capacity management, load balancing, and storage systems, to name a few. It often also includes shared operational tools. A production platform provides context for using these building blocks, possibly with an opinionated approach. A well designed production platform turns infrastructure into an easy-to-use self-service product for developers ...