Improve Your Service Scalability and Reliability with SRE

Pioneered by Google to create more scalable and reliable large-scale systems, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has become one of today's most valuable software innovation opportunities. Establishing SRE Foundations is a concise, practical guide that shows how to drive successful SRE adoption in your own organization. Dr. Vladyslav Ukis presents a step-by-step approach to establishing the right cultural, organizational, and technical process foundations, quickly achieving a "minimum viable SRE" and continually improving from there.

Dr. Ukis draws extensively on his own experiences leading an SRE transformation journey at a major healthcare company. Throughout, he answers specific questions that organizations ask about SRE, identifies pitfalls, and shows how to avoid or overcome them. Whatever your role in software development, engineering, or operations, this guide will help you apply SRE to improve what matters most: user and customer experience.

• Understand how SRE works, its role in software operations, and the challenges of SRE transformation
• Assess your organization's current operations and readiness for SRE transformation
• Achieve organizational buy-in and initiate foundational activities, including SLO definitions, alerting, on-call rotations, incident response, and error budget-based decision-making
• Align organizational structures to support a full SRE transformation
• Measure the progress and success of your SRE initiative
• Sustain and advance your SRE transformation beyond the foundations

"The techniques and principles of SRE are not only clearly defined here, but also the rationale behind them is explained in a way that will stick. This is not some dry definition, this is practical, usable understanding. . . . I can whole-heartedly recommend this book without any reservation. This is a very good book on an important topic that helps to move the game forward for our discipline!"

--From the Foreword by David Farley, Founder and CEO of Continuous Delivery Ltd.

From the Foreword by Dave Farley

"This book does two things and does both extremely well.

At its heart, this book describes how the engineering approach that underpins SRE provides greater clarity and more effective collaboration between the three main strands of development: People focused primarily on the product, its development, and its operation.

The second thing that this book does is to describe how to start making changes to apply this kind of thinking, and the techniques of SRE, in a preexisting real-world, complex development organization. This is clearly based on much more than a theoretical understanding or interpretation—these are words from a practitioner.

I can whole-heartedly recommend this book without any reservation. This is a very good book on an important topic that helps to move the game forward for our discipline! I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have."

—Dave Farley Independent Software Development Consultant Founder and CEO of Continuous Delivery Ltd.

Review

"Many enterprises today face the challenge of establishing modern operations for their SaaS offerings. This book provides a proven step-by-step guide for how this can be done from scratch using Google's SRE methodology. From achieving organizational buy-in to laying down the basic SRE foundations, establishing incident response and implementing a suitable organizational structure--the book contains a wealth of advice for development, operations, and leadership teams!"

--Dr. Peter Schardt, Chief Technology Officer at Siemens Healthcare GmbH

"Establishing SRE Foundations is a great introductory guide for anyone new to understanding and implementing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in their organization. Vlad creates a solid platform for anyone wishing to understand the SRE approach to building reliability into software services. As well as practical advice on implementing techniques such as SLIs and SLOs, Vlad goes into detail on how to achieve buy-in for SRE adoption and how to modify your organizational setup, rooted in his own experiences of working in a large organization. Those experiences are sorely lacking elsewhere in SRE literature, and when I'm asked in the future about SRE, I'll be referring people to this excellent book."

--Steve Smith, author of Measuring Continuous Delivery (2020)

"I very much enjoyed reading this book, even in its early forms. Vlad treats the topic of SRE methodically and in great detail; if you have ever been wondering whether or not someone else has come across your particular issue in an SRE implementation, this book can answer that question and probably has an actionable solution as well. Destined to become a constantly referenced handbook by all those involved in SRE change projects."

--Niall Murphy, co-author of Site Reliability Engineering (2016) and The Site Reliability Handbook (2018)

"There are an overwhelming number of blogs, books, podcasts, and ad hoc opinions covering the nitty-gritty of SRE toolchains and technology choices. That being said, SRE initiatives rarely fail for technological reasons--they fail for structural or organizational reasons. In Establishing SRE Foundations, Dr. Ukis has given us all a detailed, accessible, and actionable blueprint for the structures and practices of a successful SRE organization. It is an excellent book and one I would recommend to anyone looking to establish a scaled-out SRE practice in a complex environment."

--Ben Sigelman, co-founder of Lightstep

"Establishing SRE Foundations provides far and away the clearest, most comprehensive, and most actionable roadmap I have seen for driving, scaling, and sustaining SRE in an engineering organization. I cannot recommend it highly enough!"

--Randy Shoup, eBay Chief Architect and former Google Engineering leader

"Establishing SRE Foundations is a comprehensive guide for anyone looking to take their software operations to the next level. If you are a beginner, you will learn why SRE is a great methodology for improving operations, what the challenges of introducing SRE are, how to achieve organizational buyin for SRE, how to lay the foundation for SRE in your teams, and how to drive continuous improvement. If you are an experienced practitioner, you will learn how to set up an error budget policy, enable error budget–based decision-making, and implement a suitable organizational structure. I think the content of the book is spot on and highly recommend it!"

--Vitor dos Reis, Director of Software Engineering at Delivery Hero

"Vlad offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of the transformation to SRE. He covers assessment, organizational structures, technical implementation, communication, and continuation. This book is a clear roadmap for any organization starting or progressing their SRE journey, replete with what to consider, options available, and real-world examples. If you are thinking about starting the SRE journey, have found yourself stalled along the way, or are looking for more ideas to help you continue the journey successfully, then buy this book."

--Doc Norton, Change Catalyst, OnBelay Consulting

About the Author

Dr. Vladyslav Ukis is head of R&D for the Siemens Healthineers teamplay digital health platform and reliability lead for all Siemens Healthineers Digital Health products. Previously, as software development lead, he drove Continuous Delivery, SRE, and DevRel transformation, helping this large distributed development organization evolve architecture, deployment, testing, operations, and culture to implement these new processes at scale.