Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Part IV. Infrastructure Design

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This will be Part IV 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].

This section explores how SREs build and maintain the foundational environments in which services operate. Rather than treating infrastructure as a static set of resources, SRE applies a software engineering mindset to design environments that are inherently robust, scalable, and efficient.

We begin with Chapter 12, “Automation and Tooling”. A core tenet of SRE is that we should engineer our systems rather than purely operate them, using automation to save time, ensure consistency, and achieve sublinear scaling. This chapter also explores the nuance of when and when not to automate. It discusses the ironies of automation, warning against the de-skilling of operators and the creation of new, more complex maintenance work. It provides a framework for incremental automation, and systematic toil reduction to keep engineering workloads sustainable.

Next, Chapter 13, “Testing” examines how we build confidence in our systems. The chapter moves beyond the traditional hierarchy ...