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trnl's review against another edition
5.0
One of the best books I've ever read. It's a must for everyone who is connected to software, systems and architecture. I deeply impressed how it's covering everything, from sociological (interrupts, burnouts, communication) to technology (distributed consensus, telemetry) and standardization.
gianouts's review against another edition
4.0
This book contains a number of insights into Google's SRE practice. It is a bit repetitive at times but this assists in drilling in some of the key points.
lamdor's review against another edition
4.0
Some really great chapters especially towards the beginning and the end. However, I feel like it could have been edited better. It meanders a lot.
billmorrow's review
3.0
There's a lot of good information here but a lot to try to consume as an audiobook. The narrator did a great job with the technical, sometimes complicated subject matter.
kwugirl's review against another edition
3.0
We read this in the book club at work and had skipped some of the later chapters. I'd been thinking that I should read all of it to really mark this book as done but...I can't quite remember anymore what we didn't read anyway, and I know we did at least read most of it!
The general conclusion from our discussions was that there was a lot of a value in getting this book published and understanding some of the processes that Google has set up over the years. Most interesting to me was the idea of an "error budget" to align reliability folks and new feature developers--you're allowed up to a certain amount of downtime, so people assess the risk of adding new items and can't just turf over reliability as someone else's problem.
There were some instances of us sensing a tone of Google arrogance, but it's hard to pin down; some of these practices were in fact invented there, but others are sometimes described in a slightly patronizing way that just made it look like Google engineers should go out to conferences and mingle with others in their own field a bit more, because those practices are now accepted as standard and not a shiny revelation.
Overall, since I am not an SRE nor have worked in ops, I was glad to read this book to have a better understanding of that field, but also grateful to have read it with practicing non-Google SREs to have their commentary and not accept The Google Way as gospel.
The general conclusion from our discussions was that there was a lot of a value in getting this book published and understanding some of the processes that Google has set up over the years. Most interesting to me was the idea of an "error budget" to align reliability folks and new feature developers--you're allowed up to a certain amount of downtime, so people assess the risk of adding new items and can't just turf over reliability as someone else's problem.
There were some instances of us sensing a tone of Google arrogance, but it's hard to pin down; some of these practices were in fact invented there, but others are sometimes described in a slightly patronizing way that just made it look like Google engineers should go out to conferences and mingle with others in their own field a bit more, because those practices are now accepted as standard and not a shiny revelation.
Overall, since I am not an SRE nor have worked in ops, I was glad to read this book to have a better understanding of that field, but also grateful to have read it with practicing non-Google SREs to have their commentary and not accept The Google Way as gospel.
balise's review against another edition
5.0
A very nice collection of essays on topics that range from "people topics" to "nontrivial tech topics" - I enjoyed the variety and the "horizon-broadening" perspective.
ellimister's review against another edition
4.0
Good info but I may have to read it again once I’ve been doing this for a bit before I fully understand all of it.
jakemcc's review against another edition
3.0
This is a good book but, at least for me, it was hard to read cover-to-cover. This is probably why it took me over half a year to read. There is a fair amount of repetition throughout the book which definitely made breezing through it more of a chore. It made it easy to set it down and pick it up later.
It was interesting to get a peek into Google and what they value with regards to running their services. It might be because of the software circles I've matured in but there wasn't much in here that was surprising.
Is everything in this book relevant for a smaller shop? Definitely not. Can you pick up ideas that might help you run your services a bit smoother? Yes.
It was interesting to get a peek into Google and what they value with regards to running their services. It might be because of the software circles I've matured in but there wasn't much in here that was surprising.
Is everything in this book relevant for a smaller shop? Definitely not. Can you pick up ideas that might help you run your services a bit smoother? Yes.