Part IV - Management

  1. Table of Contents
  2. Foreword
  3. Preface
  4. Part I - Introduction
  5. 1. Introduction
  6. 2. The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE
  7. Part II - Principles
  8. 3. Embracing Risk
  9. 4. Service Level Objectives
  10. 5. Eliminating Toil
  11. 6. Monitoring Distributed Systems
  12. 7. The Evolution of Automation at Google
  13. 8. Release Engineering
  14. 9. Simplicity
  15. Part III - Practices
  16. 10. Practical Alerting
  17. 11. Being On-Call
  18. 12. Effective Troubleshooting
  19. 13. Emergency Response
  20. 14. Managing Incidents
  21. 15. Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
  22. 16. Tracking Outages
  23. 17. Testing for Reliability
  24. 18. Software Engineering in SRE
  25. 19. Load Balancing at the Frontend
  26. 20. Load Balancing in the Datacenter
  27. 21. Handling Overload
  28. 22. Addressing Cascading Failures
  29. 23. Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability
  30. 24. Distributed Periodic Scheduling with Cron
  31. 25. Data Processing Pipelines
  32. 26. Data Integrity: What You Read Is What You Wrote
  33. 27. Reliable Product Launches at Scale
  34. Part IV - Management
  35. 28. Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond
  36. 29. Dealing with Interrupts
  37. 30. Embedding an SRE to Recover from Operational Overload
  38. 31. Communication and Collaboration in SRE
  39. 32. The Evolving SRE Engagement Model
  40. Part V - Conclusions
  41. 33. Lessons Learned from Other Industries
  42. 34. Conclusion
  43. Appendix A. Availability Table
  44. Appendix B. A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services
  45. Appendix C. Example Incident State Document
  46. Appendix D. Example Postmortem
  47. Appendix E. Launch Coordination Checklist
  48. Appendix F. Example Production Meeting Minutes
  49. Bibliography

Part IV. Management

Our final selection of topics covers working together in a team, and working as teams. No SRE is an island, and there are some distinctive ways in which we work.

Any organization that aspires to be serious about running an effective SRE arm needs to consider training. Teaching SREs how to think in a complicated and fast-changing environment with a well-thought-out and well-executed training program has the promise of instilling best practices within a new hire’s first few weeks or months that otherwise would take months or years to accumulate. We discuss strategies for doing just that in Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond.

As anyone in the operations world knows, responsibility for any significant service comes with a lot of interruptions: production getting in a bad state, people requesting updates to their favorite binary, a long queue of consultation requests…managing interrupts under turbulent conditions is a necessary skill, as we’ll discuss in Dealing with Interrupts.

If the turbulent conditions have persisted for long enough, an SRE team needs to start recovering from operational overload. We have just the flight plan for you in Embedding an SRE to Recover from Operational Overload.

We write in Communication and Collaboration in SRE, about the different roles within SRE; cross-team, cross-site, and cross-continent communication; running production meetings; and case studies of how SRE has collaborated well.

Finally, The Evolving SRE Engagement Model, examines a cornerstone of the operation of SRE: the production readiness review (PRR), a crucial step in onboarding a new service. We discuss how to conduct PRRs, and how to move beyond this successful, but also limited, model.

Further Reading from Google SRE

Building reliable systems requires a carefully calibrated mix of skills, ranging from software development to the arguably less-well-known systems analysis and engineering disciplines. We write about the latter disciplines in "The Systems Engineering Side of Site Reliability Engineering" [Hix15b].

Hiring SREs well is critical to having a high-functioning reliability organization, as explored in "Hiring Site Reliability Engineers" [Jon15]. Google’s hiring practices have been detailed in texts like Work Rules! [Boc15],134 but hiring SREs has its own set of particularities. Even by Google’s overall standards, SRE candidates are difficult to find and even harder to interview effectively.

134Written by Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations.

Copyright © 2017 Google, Inc. Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0