The Site Reliability Workbook

Part II. Practices

Building upon the solid foundation of SRE principles covered in Part I, Part II dives deep into how to conduct SRE-related activities that Google has found important for operating at scale.

Some of these topics, such as data processing pipelines and managing load, won’t apply to all organizations. Other topics, such as safely handling changes with configuration and canarying, on-call practices, and what to do when things go wrong, contain valuable lessons for any SRE team.

This part also introduces an important SRE skill—Non-Abstract Large System Design (NALSD)—and presents a detailed example of how to practice this design process.

As we move from SRE foundations to practices, we wanted to provide a bit more context on the relationship between operational duties and project work, and the engineering it takes to accomplish both strategically.

Defining Operational Work (Versus Project Work and Overhead)

Before we move from foundations to practices, we wanted to touch on the difference between operational and project work, and how these two types of work inform each other. The topic is an area of philosophical debate in the SRE community, so this interlude presents how we define the two types of work in the context of this book.

SRE practices apply software engineering solutions to operational problems. Because our SRE teams are responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the systems we support, our engineering work often focuses on tasks that might be operations ...