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Today we’re looking at the best SRE books of all time.
🧠 Did you know? According to CNBC, you don’t need a degree to become a site reliability engineer.
What is site reliability engineering?
Site reliability engineering (SRE) ensures that an organization’s software systems are scalable and reliable.
Site reliability engineers bridge the gap between operations and development. They have to be proficient with:
- software engineering
- IT operations
- automation
- analyzation
- change
And beyond.
This post contains affiliate links. I may receive compensation if you buy something. Read my disclosure for more details.
TLDR: Best Site Reliability Engineering Books
The following are the top three SRE books recommended by Google, and we happen to agree:
🔥 Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
💥 The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE
🚨 Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
Best SRE Books
Now let’s take a look at the best site reliability engineering books of this year.
1. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
↘️ Ideal for: SRE beginners
↘️ Topics covered: principles, practices, management
Site Reliability Engineering contains a collection of essays and articles detailing how SRE has enabled Google to build, deploy, monitor and maintain their massive software systems.
➡️ Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems is one of the best SRE books because it was written by members of Google’s Site Reliability Team.
The book is divided into four sections:
✅ Introduction
✅ Principles
✅ Practices
✅ Management
Then you’ll discover how Google was able to make their systems scalable, efficient and reliable.
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems shows you how to take Google’s SRE successes and apply them to your organization.
🚀 Get more official training from Google with the course Site Reliability Engineering: Measuring and Managing Reliability on Coursera.
2. The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE
↘️ Ideal for: engineers reading O’Reilly’s Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
↘️ Topics covered: running reliable services, practical applications
In this handy workbook, you’ll find solid examples of how to put SRE into action in your work environment.
➡️ The Site Reliability Workbook is the companion to Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems. It was also written by members of Google’s Site Reliability Team.
In addition to examples of Google’s implementation of SRE, you’ll find case studies of Google’s Cloud customers including Evernote, Home Depot and The New York Times.
You’ll learn:
✅ how to run reliable services in environments like the cloud
✅ create, monitor, and run your services with Service Level Objectives
✅ convert existing ops to SRE
✅ methods to start SRE from greenfield or brownfield
And beyond.
The Site Reliability Workbook is chock full of professional site reliability engineering examples and applications you can apply to new or existing projects.
🚀 Take your skills to the next level with the official Google Learning Path SRE and DevOps Engineer with Google Cloud on Pluralsight.
3. Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
↘️ Ideal for: engineers who have read O’Reilly’s Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems book
↘️ Topics covered: design strategies, recommendations, best practices
Building on concepts from Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, you’ll discover insights from security and reliability practitioners covering design, implementation and maintenance.
➡️ Building Secure and Reliable Systems is the follow-up to the book Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, and was written by members of Google’s Site Reliability Team.
First you’ll learn how to build and adopt best practices while discovering:
✅ design strategies
✅ recommendations for coding, testing and debugging
✅ strategies to manage incidents
And beyond.
Building Secure & Reliable Systems expands on concepts from Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems and takes you to the next level of SRE.
Here’s what site reliability engineers are saying about Building Secure & Reliable Systems:
This book is an excellent framework for reviewing the best ways to organize your software engineering teams around having impactful systems that can be released quickly, reliably and securely.
– Jason D. Clinton
🔥 Geena’s Hot Take
Ok, so we’re going for the 1, 2, 3 punch here… 🥊
Site reliability engineering can be tricky. So what better way than to learn from members of Google’s Site Reliability Team?
These were all written by Google’s site reliability engineering team members:
💥 Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
💥 The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE
💥 Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
This is THE combination that will get you where you need to be in your site reliability engineering journey.
If you’re just getting started or want to improve on your SRE tactics, I recommend this unmatched trio.
4. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
↘️ Ideal for: experienced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: cloud computing, design, operation
The Practice of Cloud System Administration is geared towards DevOps and experienced SREs interested in cloud computing.
➡️ The Practice of Cloud System Administration is one of the best SRE books to learn how to apply your SRE skills to large distributed systems.
Packed with case studies from Google, Etsy, Facebook, Netflix and beyond, you’ll find coverage of:
✅ building and designing modern web and distributed systems
✅ operating and running systems using SRE strategies
✅ assessing and evaluating your team’s effectiveness
And more.
5. Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
↘️ Ideal for: experienced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: chaos engineering
Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice is geared towards experienced SREs who want to discover vulnerabilities and outages BEFORE they happen.
➡️ Chaos Engineering is one of the best SRE books for learning this subset of site reliability engineering.
Basically you experiment on systems to make them more resilient during production. And it can get a little… chaotic.
You’ll learn how to navigate complex systems and:
✅ use chaos engineering to navigate complexity
✅ explore methodologies to avoid failure
✅ think about complexity in software systems
✅ learn how to design chaos experiments
Throughout the book, you’ll find real-world stories from experts at Google, Microsoft, Slack and more.
Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice was written by Casey Rosenthal and Nora Jones, who pioneered chaos engineering at Netflix.
Here’s what site reliability engineers are saying about Chaos Engineering:
There is no better way to test your system than Chaos Engineering!
– Eric Vanhove
6. Real-World SRE: The Survival Guide for Responding to a System Outage and Maximizing Uptime
↘️ Ideal for: SRE newbies
↘️ Topics covered: tools, strategies, SRE interviews
Real-World SRE aims to help you prepare for and navigate almost any SRE disaster.
➡️ Real-World SRE is one of the best SRE books for software developers “in the middle of catastrophic website failure.”
Now that’s a pretty strong statement, so let’s take a look at what this book has to offer.
First off, you’ll find tried and tested methods for:
✅ monitoring web services
✅ setting up alerts
✅ evaluating your incident response
Then you’ll find tools and strategies used to test and release software, predict bottlenecks and more.
Finally, you’ll find a section on passing the site reliability engineering interview.
7. Chaos Engineering: Site Reliability Through Controlled Disruption
↘️ Ideal for: experienced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: chaos engineering
It’s similar to Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice, but you’ll get the expertise of Mikolaj Pawlikowski, creator of the Kubernetes chaos engineering tool PowerfulSeal.
➡️ Chaos Engineering: Site Reliability Through Controlled Disruption is one of the best SRE books for experienced site reliability engineers.
With ample examples, you’ll learn how to design and execute controlled experiments on everything from a WordPress site to distributed systems.
First you’ll learn how to:
✅ inject failure into processes and applications
✅ test software using Kubernetes
✅ simulate database connection latency
Then you’ll discover how to improve your team’s failure response.
8. Hands-On Site Reliability Engineering
↘️ Ideal for: beginner, intermediate and advanced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: fundamentals, tools, examples
Hands-On Site Reliability Engineering is a thorough, comprehensive guide covering the foundations of SRE all the way up to advanced topics.
➡️ Hands-On Site Reliability Engineering is one of the best SRE books for beginner, intermediate and advanced site reliability engineers.
First, with tons of hands-on examples, you’ll learn about:
✅ SRE fundamentals
✅ how to execute site reliability engineering
✅ successful techniques to put SRE into production
✅ popular SRE tools
✅ advanced SRE techniques
And beyond.
Then you’ll deep dive into the essential elements of an IT system such as:
✅ microservices
✅ application architectures
✅ types of software deployment
✅ load balancing
And more.
9. Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
↘️ Ideal for: SRE beginners
↘️ Topics covered: SRE principles, implementing SRE
Seeking SRE is a conversational piece where site reliability engineers share their experiences on various aspects of SRE.
➡️ Seeking SRE is one of the best SRE books for learning how to implement site reliability engineering.
Seeking SRE is a conversational book about SRE principles and implementation.
First you’ll find entries from engineers and other SRE leaders.
Then you’ll discover:
✅ how SRE relates to DevOps
✅ cutting edge SRE best practices
✅ technologies that make SRE easier
Finally, you’ll explore the human side of site reliability engineering.
10. SRE with Java Microservices: Patterns for Reliable Microservices in the Enterprise
↘️ Ideal for: experienced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: application metrics, debugging, traffic management
SRE Microservices with Java examines microservices individually and as a whole so you can create resilient Java applications.
➡️ SRE Microservices with Java is one of the best SRE books with Java code examples to demonstrate SRE microservices in action.
It covers site reliability engineering concepts from companies that use microservices.
You’ll also find tried and tested SRE patterns covering:
✅ application metrics
✅ debugging with observability
✅ charting and alerting
✅ traffic management
And beyond.
11. 97 Things Every SRE Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
↘️ Ideal for: newbie to advanced site reliability engineers
↘️ Topics covered: disaster plan, integrating empathy, advice
97 Things Every SRE Should Know is similar to Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale because it’s a collection of quips and essays from experienced site reliability engineers.
But this is a much shorter book.
➡️ 97 Things Every SRE Should Know is one of the best SRE books for insight on site reliability engineering from experienced SREs.
Packed with actionable advice, you’ll learn:
✅ how to adopt SRE
✅ why SLOs matter
✅ when you need to upgrade your incident response
✅ the difference between observability and monitoring
And much more.
In addition, you’ll face more intense topics such as testing your disaster plan, integrating empathy and other advice.
97 Things Every SRE Should Know was edited by the co-founders of Incident Labs, Jaime Woo and Emil Stolarsky.
Best SRE Books: Conclusion
Now let’s look at some of the top site reliability engineering books on our list.
Today we looked at the best site reliability engineering books including the trifecta from O’Reilly:
🔥 Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
💥 The Site Reliability Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE
🚨 Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
So whether you want to invest in one or all three, or dig into another action-packed SRE book on our list, we’ve got you covered with these best SRE books.
Site Reliability Engineers are also reading:
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- Is LeetCode Worth It? [AlgoExpert vs LeetCode vs HackerRank]
- 9 FAANG Interview Courses You Can’t Afford to Miss Out On [Get Hired at a FAANG]
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