Site Reliability Engineering Tidbits
Site Reliability Engineering Tidbits
Learn SRE Principles & Techniques for Observability, Monitoring, SLOs, Resilience and Debugging.
About the Book
Site Reliability Engineering is a relatively young discipline focused on treating operations as a software problem. Because it is so young, the SRE knowledge base is still growing. The goal is to make this book short, light and fun, but most importantly relevant.
Each chapter in this book describes a Site Reliability Engineering concept in a short and easily digestible way. The chapters in this book aim to provide every software engineer with information that can be used to increase the reliability of the systems they work on.
Topics include: observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging.
These concepts have been at the core of my personal SRE journey, and my hope is that you will find them valuable too!
Table of Contents
- Copyright
- About the Author
- Introduction
-
15 months of 24x7 Primary On-Call — Here’s How I Survived
- Background
- Surface Actionable Metrics
- Alert on Symptoms Not Causes
- Ratios Rule - But Be Careful
- Emulate The Customer Experience: Probes Probes Probes
- Give Yourself Room to Fail - SLO Based Alerts
- Conclusion
-
Debugging Memory Leaks Using Go
- What is a Memory Leak?
- Debug Process
- Identification
- Root Cause Analysis / Source Analysis
-
How Probes Partition the Debug Space
- Probes
- Output
- Debugging Using Probes
-
Observability Metric Namespaces and Structures
- Metric Spaces
- Metric Trees
- Defining a Metric in Terms of its Children
- Increasingly Specific — Subsets of Data
- Ratios Rule
- It’s All in the Questions
- Generic Metrics Enriched With Tags
- Conclusion
-
Debugging: Getting To Impact Through SLOs
- Phrasing the Impact in Terms of Client Impact
- Guiding With SLOs
-
Deploying SLOs Across An Organization
- What is an SLO?
- Principles
- Representative the Client Experience
- Actionable
- Minimal Investment / Low Technical Overhead
- Low Number of False Positives
- Rollout Strategy
-
No Friction Application Observability Using Envoy
- Problem
- Envoy
- Example
- Conclusion
-
Alerting on SLOs
- Terminology Refresher
- Client Experience
- Objective Quantities
- Call to Action
- Generic Tooling
- Conclusion
-
Debugging Fundamentals: Profiling
- What is Profiling?
- Why Profile? - Risks of Not Profiling
- How to Profile
- Profile Profiles “drilling-down”
- Conclusion
-
Performance Analysis: Tuning Methodology Using a Simple HTTP Webserver
- Strategy
- Simple HTTP Server Architecture
- Determine Goals (Dimensions)
- Setup the Test Harness
- Observe
- Execute/Observe/Analyze
- Profile
- Analysis - Hypothesis
- Tune the Application - Experiment
- Execute/Observe/Analyze
- 2000 Requests / Second
- 3000 Requests / second
- Analysis - Hypothesis
- Tune the application - Experiment
- Execute/Observe/Analyze
- Conclusion
-
Distributed Tracing: Impact on Engineering Organizations
- Onboarding
- Development
- Operations
- Conclusion
-
Dashboard Patterns: Aggregate View
- Why Views?
- So What’s an Aggregate View?
- Throughput
- Availability
- Latency
- Conclusion
-
Dashboard Patterns: Component Views
- Purpose
- Feedback Loops
- In Practice
- Approach
- Conclusion
-
Why Capacity Planning Needs Queueing Theory (Without the Hard Math)
- Problem
- Capacity Planning Organizational Systems
- Conclusion
-
Debugging Lambda File Descriptor Exhaustion
- Background
- A Strange Occurrence
- AWS Support
- Ensuring the Rollup Script Worked
- Moving Forward
- Starting to Debug
- Back to Basics
- Verifying Hypothesis
- Bounding Resource Usage
- Error Free!
-
Debugging Heuristics: Drivers of Increased Latency
- Increase in the Amount of Work Being Done
- Increased in the Type of Work Being Done
- Change in the Amount of Work Performed in Each Transaction
- Conclusion
-
Knowledge Graphs: Increased Context in Human Involved Incident Response
- An Example
- So What is an Incident Response (IR) Knowledge Graph?
- Components
- IR Knowledge Graphs In Practice
- The Incident
- Conclusion
-
Bolt on Rate Limiting
- Protecting Resources
- What is Envoy??
- Solving Rate Limiting Using Envoy
- Conclusion
-
Debugging Strategies: Triangulation
- What is Triangulation?
- Example Scenario
- Heuristics
- Conclusion
-
Debugging SQL Performance Using the “EXPLAIN” Statement
- Methodology
- Determine the Table Schema
- Determine the Table Index
- EXPLAIN the Query
- Leveraging the Index
- Predicate Query Missing Sortkey
- Results
- Stay on Top of Your ETL Pipelines With Table Freshness Checks
- Detecting Resource Leaks With Baseline Tests
-
Data Operational Maturity
- Maturity Model
- Level 1 - Mechanism
- Level 2 - Consistency
- Level 3 – Accuracy
- Conclusion
-
Bulkheads in Action — Partitioning to Minimize Failure Impact
- What are Bulkheads?
- Why Use Bulkheads
- How?
- When to Use?
-
Retries in Action: Availability in Exchange for Latency
- What are Retries?
- Why Use Retries?
- How?
- When to Use?
- Caveats
-
Probing 101
- Uptime Probes
- What Probes Don’t Do
- Purpose of Probes
- How to start probing
- Uses
- Conclusion
-
Using Views for Backwards Compatible Data Migrations
- Common Database Clients
- Leveraging Views
- Example of a View Based Migration
- Conclusion
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