Budget for Failure
What SRE is and how to practice it
A ground-up guide to site reliability engineering for anyone learning it: the role, the numbers it runs on, the code it shapes, and the platform under it.
4 parts
What an SRE Does: The Job Behind the Title
Site reliability engineering is software engineering applied to operations. What an SRE owns, what they watch, and how the role differs from DevOps.
SLI, SLO, SLA, Error Budget: The Numbers SRE Runs On
An SLI is what you measure, an SLO is the target, an SLA is the contract, and the error budget is the gap you may spend. The arithmetic, shown on AWS.
SRE in the Codebase: Timeouts, Retries, and Alerts as Code
Reliability is decided in the repository. What an SRE reviews in application code: timeouts, retries, health checks, rollouts, and burn-rate alerts as code.
Cloud or On-Prem: What an SRE Checks Under the Service
The platform is your largest dependency. What an SRE verifies on a cloud or in a data center: failure domains, control planes, quotas, capacity, upkeep.