The Site Reliability Workbook

Chapter 12. Introducing Non-Abstract Large System Design

By Salim Virji, James Youngman, Henry Robertson, Stephen Thorne, Dave Rensin, and Zoltan Egyed with Richard Bondi

With responsibilities that span production operations and product engineering, SRE is in a unique position to align business case requirements and operational costs. Product engineering teams may not be aware of the maintenance cost of systems they design, especially if that product team is building a single component that factors into a greater production ecosystem.

Based on Google’s experience developing systems, we consider reliability to be the most critical feature of any production system. We find that deferring reliability issues during design is akin to accepting fewer features at higher costs. By following an iterative style of system design and implementation, we arrive at robust and scalable designs with low operational costs. We call this style Non-Abstract Large System Design (NALSD).

What Is NALSD?

This chapter presents a NALSD approach: we begin with the problem statement, gather requirements, and iterate through designs that become increasingly sophisticated until we reach a viable solution. Ultimately, we arrive at a system that defends against many failure modes and satisfies both the initial requirements and additional details that emerged as we iterated.

NALSD describes a skill critical to SRE: the ability to assess, design, and evaluate large systems. Practically, NALSD combines elements ...