SRE From Scratch 📖 - A Practical Guide to Building SRE in Any Organization
SRE From Scratch is a book designed for teams and individuals who want to implement Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles but lack executive buy-in, funding, or top-down initiatives. This guide provides practical, no-nonsense strategies to bootstrap SRE functions in any environment—whether you’re in a startup, mid-sized business, or large enterprise without formal SRE structures.
🚀 Why This Book?
Many organizations struggle to adopt SRE because:
- There’s no formal SRE team or budget.
- Engineers are too busy firefighting incidents to focus on reliability.
- Leadership doesn’t see the value in SRE beyond keeping systems running.
- There’s no structured roadmap for implementing SRE principles.
SRE From Scratch provides a step-by-step playbook for implementing SLOs, SLIs, observability, automation, and incident response without waiting for executive approval.
📖 Book Outline
Introduction
- What is SRE, and why does it matter?
- The challenges of starting an SRE program
- Who this book is for
Part 1: Laying the Foundation
Chapter 1: Defining the SRE Mission
- Aligning SRE with business objectives
- Crafting a mission that fits your organization
Chapter 2: Structuring Your SRE Team
- The three pillars of SRE: Incident Response, Observability, Tooling & Automation
- Team models: Cross-functional vs. dedicated teams
Chapter 3: Establishing Priorities
- Assessing the current state of reliability
- Golden signals: What to measure first
- Building leadership reports from day one
Part 2: Implementing SRE Practices
Chapter 4: Getting Organizational Buy-In
- How to secure funding with limited resources
- Creative ways to gain leadership and team support
- Building relationships through team dinners, talks, and collaboration
Chapter 5: Measuring Reliability Effectively
- Cutting through the noise: Finding the right signals
- Setting SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets that make sense
- Aligning metrics with business objectives
Chapter 6: Alerting Without the Noise
- How to refine alerts to focus on what truly matters
- Balancing automation with human oversight
Chapter 7: Incident Response and On-Call Rotations
- Setting up a sustainable on-call schedule
- Effective postmortems: Turning failures into opportunities
- Driving teams to implement fixes within SLA
Part 3: Driving a Reliability Culture
Chapter 8: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
- Overcomplicating SRE: Why simplicity wins
- Best practices vs. what actually works
Chapter 9: Balancing Reliability with Feature Development
- The role of error budgets in decision-making
- Collaborating with engineering teams to maintain balance
Chapter 10: Scaling and Evolving Your SRE Program
- When and how to grow your SRE team
- Adapting to organizational changes
Conclusion
- Final thoughts on SRE as an ongoing practice
- How to continuously improve your program
This book emphasizes practical implementation using widely available tools:
- Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Elastic Stack.
- Incident Response: Rootly, PagerDuty (Free Tier), Slack Automations.
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions.
- Chaos Engineering: Gremlin, LitmusChaos, GameDay Simulations.
- SLOs & SLIs: Real-world strategies for defining reliability metrics.
🎯 Who Is This For?
🔹 Engineers in Resource-Constrained Teams → Want to introduce SRE without waiting for leadership approval.
🔹 DevOps & Platform Engineers → Looking for a realistic approach to integrating SRE principles.
🔹 IT Operations & SysAdmins → Want to move beyond firefighting and implement automation & reliability practices.
🔹 Startup Founders & CTOs → Need practical SRE adoption strategies without hiring a dedicated team.
📌 Current Status
✅ In Progress
- Initial manuscript writing & structuring.
- Developing real-world case studies and example implementations.
🔜 Upcoming
- Early reader access & community feedback.
- Technical reviews & refining practical examples.
- Official launch & publication.
📢 Get Involved
I’m looking for feedback, early readers, and contributors who want to share their SRE experiences.
If you’re interested in collaborating, reviewing, or sharing your SRE journey, let’s connect!
📧 Contact: [thisbrad@icloud.com]
🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/bradtaco/sre-from-scratch
📚 Book Website: [Coming Soon]
🌎 Why SRE From Scratch?
- No BS, No Theoretical Jargon → Just real-world, actionable steps.
- No Budget? No Problem. → Learn how to do SRE with zero funding.
- Real Examples, Not Just Google’s Playbook. → Focused on what works in real teams with real constraints.
SRE isn’t about buying tools or hiring Google’s team—it’s about building a culture of reliability, one step at a time. 🚀