Notes on Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Book
I like this book a lot. If you care about building reliable systems, reading through this book and seeing what the teams around you don’t do seems like a good exercise. That being said, the book isn’t perfect. The two big downsides for me stem from the same issue: this is one of those books that’s a collection of chapters by different people. Some of the editors are better than others, meaning that some of the chapters are clearer than others and that because the chapters seem designed to be readable as standalone chapters, there’s a fair amount of redundancy in the book if you just read it straight through. Depending on how you plan to use the book, that can be a positive, but it’s a negative to me. But even including he downsides, I’d say that this is the most valuable technical book I’ve read in the past year and I’ve covered probably 20% of the content in this set of notes. If you really like these notes, you’ll probably want to read the full book.
