#28 – Reacting to Google’s SRE Book 2016 (Chapter 1 Part 1)

Episode 28 [SREpath Podcast]

Show notes

Sebastian and I got together to react to and discuss 5 passages from Chapter 1 of Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book (2016) by Betsy Beyer, Jennifer Pettof, Niall Murphy, et al.

We covered passages like:

1. The sysadmin approach and the accompanying development ops split have a number of disadvantages and pitfalls
2. Google has chosen to run our systems with a different approach. Our Site Reliability Engineering teams focus on hiring software engineers to run our products
3. The term DevOps emerged in industry. One could equivalently view SRE as a specific implementation of DevOps with some idiosyncratic extensions.
4. Google caps operational work for SREs at 50 percent of their time. Their remaining time should be spent using their coding skills on project work.
5. Product development and SRE teams can enjoy a productive working relationship by eliminating the structural conflict in their respective goals