Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Foreword

The first edition of Site Reliability Engineering was published a decade ago, and at the time we weren’t sure how much interest there would be in its content. The SRE Book, as it became known, captured much of our accumulated knowledge, experiences, best practices, and ideas for operating Google-scale distributed systems. However, we were concerned that what we wrote about might be too esoteric or Google-specific to be broadly useful. We thought that perhaps a few thousand people might read our book, and fewer still would put it into practice.

I am pleased to say that we may have slightly underestimated the interest in our material. Adoption exceeded our wildest expectations, and it has become one of O’Reilly’s most popular books. Engineers and organizations across the industry have incorporated ideas, terminology, and challenges from the SRE Book into their own thinking and practices, often finding their own way of implementing, incorporating, or extending the concepts we covered. In the same period, SRE as a discipline has grown and matured, largely outside of Google itself. Within Google SRE, we are both proud of what we have achieved and happy that we have been successful in sharing it.

With another decade of SRE behind us, we also have several new observations about the profession and industry that are worth sharing and that form the subtext for much of what is in this second edition.

First, we find it notable that the growth of SRE has not come at the expense of ...