Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Preface

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 preface 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].

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of Cody Smith, an early SRE at Google, whose endless inventiveness, vivacity, humility, and unparalleled technical depth laid the foundation of Google’s success, and the careers, lives, and general well-being of many who knew him. He left us too soon.

Preface

Ten years ago, the first edition of Site Reliability Engineering set out to explain what Site Reliability Engineering is, and how Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) do it at Google. In the subsequent years, the role has become widespread beyond Google, and the approach we described has become broadly accepted in the industry. Meanwhile, the technology underpinning running large-scale distributed computing systems has become much more standardized and commoditized: unless you have very specific needs, you’re unlikely to build your own load balancer or your own distributed consensus system with Paxos—you’re probably either buying it as a service from a cloud provider, or running an instance ...