David N. Blank-Edelman - Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale

It was at SREcon16 Europe, one of the gatherings of the SRE community, that this book was born. (Full disclosure: Im one of the cofounders of SREcon.) Brian Anderson, the original OReilly editor for this book, was on the hunt. The splendid book by Google called Site Reliability Engineering had recently met with much-deserved commercial success and the publisher was on the lookout for more SRE content to publish. He and I were talking about the possibilities during a break when I realized what didnt exist for SRE. There was no volume I knew of that could bring people into some of the more interesting conversations that were happening in the field (like those that were happening at SREcon). I was seeing people discuss subjects like these:

• New implementations of SRE that didnt have a book yet. SRE has blossomed in new and exciting ways as it has taken root in different (sometimes brownfield) contexts.
• Innovative ways to learn how to practice SRE.
• What gets in the way of adopting SRE.
• The best practices people had discovered as they adopted, adapted, and lived it.
• Where the field was going next, including the subjects that are new now in the field but will be commonplace in short order.
• Finally and maybe most important what about the humans in the picture? What is SRE doing for them? What is SRE doing to them? Are humans really the problem in operations (that need to be automated away) or is that short sighted? Can SRE improve more than just operations?

And, so, the idea for Seeking SRE was born. Much to my surprise and delight, close to 40 authors from all over the field and all over the world liked the idea and decided to join me on this little project. I cant thank them enough.