Book club

Becoming SRE

First Steps Toward Reliability for You and Your Organization

David N. Blank-Edelman · O'Reilly Media, 2024

SRE isn't a recipe: you seek out teams until they seek you out.

Insight 1

Green and red flags

Sharp signals that show whether SRE in an organisation is healthy, or not.

From the bookRed: no time for engineering, only firefighting and postmortems nobody acts on. Green: on call two or three times a quarter, at most a few incidents per shift.

What I do with itThe green and red flags give direction.

Becoming SRE2/9

Insight 2

Culture and profile

Culture and the profile of an SRE: what kind of person you need to be, not only which technology you master.

From the book · ch. 2Investigating how things fail and how that feels for the end user. You base SLOs on users, not on your own thresholds.

What I do with itWe base our SLOs on the end user.

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Insight 3

There's no ‘this is how it's done’

SRE doesn't look the same everywhere. Find what fits your organisation, with the flags as a compass.

From the book · ch. 12Slapping an SRE label on DevOps or an L3 service desk doesn't work. It's not only about who is responsible for reliability, but who also feels it.

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The key point

From push to pull

People and collaboration are central. Developers who don't like meetings had better not start on SRE. First you push: you go to the teams. The goal is pull: the teams come to you. That's the sign it works.

From the bookPush: SRE chases the business and is seen as a nuisance. Pull: teams ask themselves: shouldn't someone from SRE be involved?

What I do with itFrom push to pull: that's what we strive for.

Becoming SRE5/9

Insight 5

More accessible than the Google book

Reads more easily than Site Reliability Engineering (1st edition), which quickly becomes very Google-specific.

Becoming SRE6/9

My score

Directly applicable5 5 out of 5certainly for starting teams
Depth4 4 out of 5a strong point
Readability5 5 out of 5
Shelf life3.6 3.6 out of 5may be outdated in five years, the core remains

4.5out of 5 · average, rounded to 0.5

Becoming SRE7/9

Who it's for

Starting SRE teams
Product leads and managers who hire SREs
Anyone curious about SRE

Who it's not for

People outside tech

Becoming SRE8/9

Which would you read first? Or am I missing one?