Wow! eBook
Becoming a Rockstar SRE: Electrify your site reliability engineering mindset to build reliable, resilient, and efficient systems
Author(s): Jeremy Proffitt (Author), Rod Anami (Author)
- Publisher: Packt Publishing
- Publication Date: 28 April 2023
- Language: English
- Print length: 420 pages
- ISBN-10: 1803239220
- ISBN-13: 9781803239224
Book Description
Excel in site reliability engineering by learning from field-driven lessons on observability and reliability in code, architecture, process, systems management, costs, and people to minimize downtime and enhance developers' output
Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format
Key Features
- Understand the goals of an SRE in terms of reliability, efficiency, and constant improvement
- Master highly resilient architecture in server, serverless, and containerized workloads
- Learn the why and when of employing Kubernetes, GitHub, Prometheus, Grafana, Terraform, Python, Argo CD, and GitOps
Book Description
Site reliability engineering is all about continuous improvement, finding the balance between business and product demands while working within technological limitations to drive higher revenue. But quantifying and understanding reliability, handling resources, and meeting developer requirements can sometimes be overwhelming. With a focus on reliability from an infrastructure and coding perspective, Becoming a Rockstar SRE brings forth the site reliability engineer (SRE) persona using real-world examples.
This book will acquaint you the role of an SRE, followed by the why and how of site reliability engineering. It walks you through the jobs of an SRE, from the automation of CI/CD pipelines and reducing toil to reliability best practices. You'll learn what creates bad code and how to circumvent it with reliable design and patterns. The book also guides you through interacting and negotiating with businesses and vendors on various technical matters and exploring observability, outages, and why and how to craft an excellent runbook. Finally, you'll learn how to elevate your site reliability engineering career, including certifications and interview tips and questions.
By the end of this book, you'll be able to identify and measure reliability, reduce downtime, troubleshoot outages, and enhance productivity to become a true rockstar SRE!
What you will learn
- Get insights into the SRE role and its evolution, starting from Google's original vision
- Understand the key terms, such as golden signals, SLO, SLI, MTBF, MTTR, and MTTD
- Overcome the challenges in adopting site reliability engineering
- Employ reliable architecture and deployments with serverless, containerization, and release strategies
- Identify monitoring targets and determine observability strategy
- Reduce toil and leverage root cause analysis to enhance efficiency and reliability
- Realize how business decisions can impact quality and reliability
Who this book is for
This book is for IT professionals, including developers looking to advance into an SRE role, system administrators mastering technologies, and executives experiencing repeated downtime in their organizations. Anyone interested in bringing reliability and automation to their organization to drive down customer impact and revenue loss while increasing development throughput will find this book useful. A basic understanding of API and web architecture and some experience with cloud computing and services will assist with understanding the concepts covered.
Table of Contents
- SRE Job Role - Activities and Responsibilities
- Fundamental Numbers - Reliability Statistics
- Imperfect Habits - Duct Tape Architecture and Spaghetti Code
- Essential Observability - Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT)
- Resolution Path - Master Troubleshooting
- Operational Framework - Managing Infrastructure and Systems
- Data Consumed - Observability Data Science
(N.B. Please use the Look Inside option to see further chapters)
Editorial Reviews
Review
“In theory, the book is divided into five sections, each covering a different aspect of SRE, covering everything from people to tooling and the processes which bridge them. In reality, while reading the book, I was struck by how it was actually divided in two – the theory of SRE and practical examples of what that theory means in many labs and exercises. I think that the merger of great theoretical content and practical “how does this work in the real world” is the highlight of this book.
This is not the kind of book where you need to read in order, you can skip backwards and forwards to cover the subjects which are of greatest interest to you – whether you’re a junior SRE, learning about a term for the first time or an experienced SRE looking to become a true Rockstar.
Another highlight of the book for me was the first section, which discussed the “Who, What, and Why” of a Rockstar SRE and emphasized that being a Rockstar is not just what you do technically but how you improve the people around you. I recommend this book to anyone interested in being a “Rockstar SRE”.”
--
Robert Barron, Member of the IBM Academy of Technology | Architect, Hybrid Cloud Platforms - IBM
“I have had the pleasure of working with Rod Anami for the past few years as a colleague and working in the same team as SREs. Rod is an accomplished and certified SRE with unique perspectives on how to adopt and leverage SRE tenets. He focuses on cloud-native technologies and is passionate about Kubernetes.
When I read his book Becoming a Rockstar SRE, I was impressed by how well he was able to explain complex concepts with analogies of our daily lives. He and his co-author did a great job of providing practical advice based on their own experiences as SREs.
I found the book's chapters on observability, incident management, and capacity planning as well as toil reduction with a different perspective, very informative. I also liked the focus on soft skills, such as communication and teamwork as well as how to prepare for interviews to be very useful to anyone new to the profession. These skills are just as important as technical skills for SREs who want to be successful. Overall, I thought Becoming a Rockstar SRE was an excellent book. It's a must-read for anyone who is interested in learning more about the role of an SRE.
I would recommend the book to anyone who is new to SRE or who wants to improve their SRE skills. The book is also a great resource for experienced SREs who want to get a different perspective on SRE tenets.”
--
Raghuram Srinivasan | Director, Principal Site Reliability Engineering - Kyndryl
About the Author
Jeremy Proffitt is passionate about solving problems with an unmatched sense of urgency - the definition of a Site Reliability Engineer. A master of solutions and technology knowledge, Jeremy is a rockstar SRE with AWS Professional Certifications in Architecture and DevOps. He has routinely saved millions in potential lost revenue in his career. In his free time, Jeremy enjoys sending time in his rockstar-appropriate man cave and loves venturing into 3D printing, electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) projects. Jeremy currently manages a team of top SRE and DevOps talent, driving constant improvement, and is often cited in the company as a visionary of observability and emergency response.
Rod Anami is a seasoned engineer who works with cloud infrastructure and software engineering technologies. As one of the SREs at the Kyndryl CoE, he coaches other SREs on running IT modernization, transformation, and automation projects for clients worldwide. Rod leads the global SRE guild inside Kyndryl, where he helps plant and grow SRE chapters in many countries. Rod is certified as an SRE, technical specialist, and DevOps engineer professional at the ultimate level. He holds AWS, HashiCorp, Azure, and Kubernetes certifications, among many others. He is passionate about contributing to open source software at large with Node.js libraries.
