The Software Engineer's Guidebook

CHAPTER 24

RELIABLE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

There’s a fair chance your organization implicitly or explicitly expects staff+ engineers to lead efforts to make systems more reliable.

In this chapter, we cover common approaches for building and maintaining reliable systems, including:

1. Owning reliability
2. Logging
3. Monitoring
4. Alerting
5. Oncall
6. Incident management
7. Building resilient systems

1. OWNING RELIABILITY

What role do you play in reliability as a staff+ engineer? In Big Tech, it’s often an explicit expectation that you own reliability within your sphere of influence, be that on your own team or other teams. This means it’s your responsibility to ensure reliability is measured, plans are put in place to improve it and to advocate ...