SRE

This page and its sub-pages contain my notes from studying the Google SRE workbooks:

How Google Runs Production Systems: https://sre.google/workbook/table-of-contents/

Practical Ways to Implement SRE: https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/

Pre-DevOps

Operations Challenges: Complex, context-dependent; often treated as cost center in enterprises.

DevOps

• Principles: CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing)

• Focus: Collaboration, continuous improvement, no silos.

• Key Ideas:

  • Accidents are normal and expected.

  • Gradual, small changes preferred.

  • Culture over tooling for success.

  • Measurement crucial for improvement.

SRE

• Definition: Implementing DevOps philosophy with a focus on concrete practices.

• Principles:

  • Operations is a software problem.

  • Manage by Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

  • Minimize toil; automate where possible.

  • Wisdom of production informs design.

  • Reduce cost of failure to enhance development speed.

  • Share ownership with developers.

  • Unified tooling across roles.

Comparison

• Similarities:

  • Acceptance of change.

  • Collaboration and shared ownership.

  • Small, continuous changes.

  • Importance of measurement and blameless postmortems.

  • Holistic approach to improvement.

• Differences:

  • DevOps: Broader, culture-focused; not detailed in service management.

  • SRE: Service-specific, structured around detailed principles like SLOs and error budgets.