Stephen reviewed Site Reliability Engineering by Niall Richard Murphy
Review of 'Site Reliability Engineering' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
If you are working in SRE, DevOps, CloudOps, or looking to get into those areas, this presents a good read and introduction to concepts and approaches. It is not something you need to or should read straight through. Focus on the chapters that are of interest or new to you. SRE/DevOps has grown since this book was written and introduced, so in a number of the chapters the custom built applications and code don't really apply now (I think in most instances now there are off the shelf applications that can fill the needs of most organizations vs. having to custom build solutions). The 2 drawbacks to this book is that some of the areas approach it from a very, very large scale, which a lot of organizations won't necessarily encounter themselves (very large, geographically dispersed data centers). So there is a technical focus at that scale which most likely …
If you are working in SRE, DevOps, CloudOps, or looking to get into those areas, this presents a good read and introduction to concepts and approaches. It is not something you need to or should read straight through. Focus on the chapters that are of interest or new to you. SRE/DevOps has grown since this book was written and introduced, so in a number of the chapters the custom built applications and code don't really apply now (I think in most instances now there are off the shelf applications that can fill the needs of most organizations vs. having to custom build solutions). The 2 drawbacks to this book is that some of the areas approach it from a very, very large scale, which a lot of organizations won't necessarily encounter themselves (very large, geographically dispersed data centers). So there is a technical focus at that scale which most likely won't be relevant.
The other drawback is that the voice its written, even though there are a variety of authors is one that is too overly positive in its examples and tones. Even in the worst problems presented and handled, they were all still handled well and perfectly.
Tone aside, I think that this provides a good broader perspective on topics that I think are important and germane to moving from traditional IT roles into better practice, no matter if you are looking to apply this in traditional data centers or in the cloud, or what terminology you want to apply (SRE, DevOps, DevSecOps, CI/CD, CoreOps, etc....)
