The Site Reliability Workbook

Conclusion

By Dave Rensin, Betsy Beyer, Niall Richard Murphy, Stephen Thorne, and Kent Kawahara

Onward…

The American economist Edgar Fiedler used to say that “[h]e who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.” Predicting the future is dangerous.

Nonetheless, we’re going to risk the broken glass and try to say a few useful words about what we think comes after this book.

The Future Belongs to the Past

Our experiences since the publication of the first SRE book and the process of assembling this volume have clearly demonstrated a huge pent-up demand for SRE from enterprises both large and small. From this, some interesting observations emerge.

First, large enterprises tend to have correspondingly large appetites to adopt SRE practices in a robust way. The familiar meme that large enterprises are slow to change is decidedly not true in this case. We expect to see a lot of interesting innovation in the SRE space from these firms over the next year, and that’s really exciting.

Next, smaller firms are finding ways to adopt SRE practices regardless of whether or not they can staff a full-blown, globally distributed SRE team. We’ve long speculated that although the substance and sequence of the dishes are vitally important, people don’t have to eat the whole SRE meal at once. We are now seeing that notion put into good practice, and that’s also really exciting because it allows everyone to participate.

Finally, if you are reading this book and wondering if there’s ...