Real-World SRE: The Survival Guide for Responding to a System Outage and Maximizing Uptime

Description

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster―uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion. What you will learn * Monitor for approaching catastrophic failure * Alert your team to an outage emergency * Dissect your incident response strategies * Test automation tools and build your own software * Predict bottlenecks and fight for user experience * Eliminate the competition in an SRE interview Who this book is for Real-World SRE is aimed at software developers facing a website crisis, or who want to improve the reliability of their company's software. Newcomers to Site Reliability Engineering looking to succeed at interview will also find this invaluable. Cover Copyright Mapt upsell Contributors Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1 - Introduction A brief history What is SRE? What is in the book? SRE as a framework for new projects Summary References Chapter 2 - Monitoring Why monitoring? Instrumenting an application What should we measure? A short introduction to SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets Service levels Error budgets Collecting and saving monitoring data Polling applications Nagios Prometheus Cacti Sensu Push applications StatsD Telegraf ELK Displaying monitoring information Arbitrary queries Graphs Dashboards Chatbots Managing and maintaining monitoring data Communicating about monitoring Do they even know there is monitoring? References and related reading Future reading Summary Chapter 3 - Incident Response What is an incident? What is incident response? Alerting When do you alert? How do you alert? Alerting services What is in an alert? Who do you alert? Being on call Communication Incident Command System (ICS) Where do you communicate? Recovering the system Calling all clear Summary Chapter 4 - Postmortems What is a postmortem? Why write a postmortem? When to write a postmortem document Carrying out incident analysis How to write a postmortem document Summary Impact Timeline Root cause Action items Postmortems without action items Appendix Blameless postmortems Holding a postmortem meeting Analyzing past postmortems MTTR and MTBF Alert fatigue Discussing past outages Summary References Chapter 5 - Testing and Releasing Testing What do you test? Testing code Testing infrastructure Testing processes Releasing When to release Releasing to production Validating your release Rollbacks Automation Continuous everything Summary Chapter 6 - Capacity Planning A quick introduction to business finance Why plan? Managing risk and managing expectations Defining a plan What is our current capacity? When are we going to run out of capacity? How should we change our capacity? State and concurrency Is your service limited by another service? Scaling for events Unpredictable growth–user-generated content Preplanned versus autoscaling Delivering Execute the plan Architecture–where performance changes come from Tech as a profit center and procurement Summary Chapter 7 - Building Tools Finding projects Defining projects RDD Example Design documents Planning projects Example Retrospectives and standups Allocation Building projects Advice for writing code Separation of concerns Long-term work Example OKRs Notebooks Documenting and maintaining projects Summary Chapter 8 - User Experience An introduction to design and UX Real-world interaction design User testing Picking an experience Designing the test Finding people to test Developer experience Experience of tools Performance budgets Security Authentication Authorization Risk profile Phishing ACM code of ethics Summary References Chapter 9 - Networking Foundations The internet Sending an HTTP request DNS dig Ethernet and TCP/IP Ethernet IP CIDR notation ICMP UDP TCP HTTP curl and wget Tools for watching the network netstat nc tcpdump Summary Chapter 10 - Linux and Cloud Foundations Linux fundamentals Everything is a file Files, directories, and inodes Sockets Devices /proc Filesystem layout What is a process? Zombies Orphans What is nice? syscalls How to trace Watching processes Build your own Cloud fundamentals VMs Containers Load balancing Autoscaling Storage Queues and Pub/Sub Units of scale Example architecture interview Summary References Other Books You May Enjoy Index