A review by erikars
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Niall Richard Murphy

4.0

As a Google software engineer, I read this book largely from the perspective of better understanding the practices I've seen supporting the various services I've worked on over the years. As a SWE on a high traffic critical surface, I saw many of the best practices mentioned in this book develop. It was useful to see a snapshot of how they fit together with the broader (and itself evolving) SRE philosophy.

Although I found the philosophy most interesting, the bulk of the book was practical principles on how to run reliable services. Although many of the details are specific to Google, the general principles are not. The authors provided enough information on why certain practices worked well to allow others to make their own tradeoffs about what works in their environment.

Overall, this was an interesting and valuable read.