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New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

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Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#111

Post by l9i »

malodyets wrote: post #107
sethvargo wrote: post #14

Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Thank you for all the positive comments about the book. I'll be around to answer any questions you might have. As noted, the book can be downloaded for free in digital formats. PDF: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/SRS.pdf EPUB: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-epub.epub MOBI: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-mobi.mobi

Looks great — thanks Seth. Could you guys set the correct Content-Type on the EPUB? Should be application/epub+zip

Thanks for pointing this out, we're on it (other formats have a similar problem).

(disclaimer: I work at Google)

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#112

Post by pm90 »

colinrand wrote: post #81
gonehome wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say this a lot as an excuse to keep the status quo, but often times the problems do overlap and the solutions are generally good everywhere.

You're absolutely right. I have heard that argument first had used as a means to shut down an initiative as well. These philosophies require massive judgement calls from engineering leadership with payback periods tracked in years, not quarterly OKRs.

The capacity of engineering organizations to successfully undertake multi quarter efforts is probably the best sign of competence. There seems to be a lot of short term thinking nowadays with projects based on quarters and those that don't bear fruit getting canned. Without long term investments, the org has to continuously put out fires which hobbles it and ultimately affects its ability to compete with other companies.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#113

Post by laddng »

aoeuid wrote: post #101
sosilkj wrote: post #93

What would be the equivalent trio of books for the SWE?

Google recently published the SWE Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492082791

Have you read it? Just curious if you found it to be good because the only review for it wasn't very hopeful.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#114

Post by johngalt »

rb808 wrote: post #83

Any tips for the vast majority of SRE groups where people are paid a fraction of google employees and never given any time to fix things?

You would be surprised how far you can get with consistent pressure and time. Small iterative changes. It works for practices/culture as well as technology.

There is never some big meeting where everyone decides that 'operations are going to change! From now on we are going to X!" Well sometimes there are such meetings, but often means merely adding another demand. Like a new years resolution, it is a strongly voiced command for better results, with no real changes behind it.

Real improvement is about adding practices and habits. Starting with the most needed/highest payoff items and gradually building on them.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#115

Post by lonelappde »

tnolet wrote: post #76
colinrand wrote: post #51

The most challenging part of this series is not in the material itself. These insights are learnings through hard experience and scale from Google are invaluable. No, the hard thing for everyone is to recognize is that most companies are not Google and don't have Google's problems, resources, or time to follow these practices. Definitely read the material, I will thoroughly, but don't apply this blindly. Solve YOUR p…

There is certainly a huge YAGNI danger here. 10 people shops should read this, but keep their socks on. I love the part in that other SRE book where they say to “keep it simple” right after describing probably the most involved, meticulous and vast set of software engineering practices of the last 10 years. “Simple” if you have 10B+ in the bank and 1000+ engineers to run the show.

This is why we need strong open source or liberally licensed components to build with. Small companies need to work together to keep up with the complexity of modern systems

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#116

Post by lonelappde »

brightball wrote: post #4

Is there a more digestible version of SRE concepts somewhere? I'm just looking for an easier way to communicate core principles and concepts to my team without asking them to sink into 500 pages?

Read one chapter, put it to work, repeat.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#117

Post by tom-_- »

Veserv wrote: post #108
joshuamorton wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heather Adkins is the Director of Information Security at Google, and my understanding as an author she stands in for a much larger list of SMAs who are members of the security org. In other words, your question is misformed. The abilities of the list of 3 technical authors in this case isn't relevant, the question that matters is if you believe Google's security organization and apparatus is competent. If you do, th…

I see that you mentioned Heather Adkins and her role at Google, which seems to me like a good-faith effort on your part to answer my question. I appreciate that. However, as you mention, the important question is whether I believe in Google's security organization/apparatus competence. A security organization is made of people, so the question as to authors is still relevant, it is just more numerous and hopefully be…

The level of detail you are seeking would be practically impossible to find for any matter of "expert".

Even if you were provided a list of their projects and their involvement, how would you know their competence without reading code and understanding implementation details?

Further still, can you even trust yourself to provide a competent assessment of their designs and implementation?

A single security breach should not invalidate ones credentials more than a single lost patient should invalidate a Dr's medical license, with the exception being cases of gross negligence or malfeasance.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#119

Post by Veserv »

joshuamorton wrote: post #110
Veserv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you mentioned Heather Adkins and her role at Google, which seems to me like a good-faith effort on your part to answer my question. I appreciate that. However, as you mention, the important question is whether I believe in Google's security organization/apparatus competence. A security organization is made of people, so the question as to authors is still relevant, it is just more numerous and hopefully be…

Let me ask a clarifying question then: Is there any person who organization who is qualified to speak on security best practices?

I have personal opinions as I work in a semi-related field, but I would prefer not to disclose that information.

In lieu of that, the questions I mentioned above were meant to be reasonably objective questions that would help me identify if an organization seems to be qualified in my mind without relying on reputation. Do you think any of those questions seem invalid? I tried to make them procedure agnostic to avoid discounting techniques which I am not aware of (so no, must use SHA, 2FA, antivirus, SGX, etc.). If you are willing to, are you able to identify any individuals you think have give good answers for most of those questions? Are there any questions that you think are unfair?

For instance, "Would you feel comfortable using the processes you have used in the past to develop a system where compromise would result in the loss of human life?". If the answer is no, I would not consider them an expert as there are many systems that are deployed today where compromise would result in the loss of human life (note that this does not mean those systems are appropriately secure). As an analogous case, if I found a civil engineer who made multiple bridges and then asked them, "Would you feel comfortable if any of the bridges you made in the past were used by humans?" and they said no, I would not be asking them for advice on making bridges for humans since they have never done it before.

If they answer yes to the question, I want to know why as I believe the default answer for most people is somewhere between "no" and "are you crazy". A really good answer would reference systems where they are confident in security, where compromise is valuable, have stood the test of time, and have withstood deliberate attempts to compromise against attacks in the vicinity of the value or compromise. For instance, "Person X did the security for Y bank. Y bank has a $500 Million bug bounty for system compromise (which is not onerous to collect)." would be pretty convincing. If your answer is a $500 Million bug bounty is absurd, you can look at some of my other replies under my original comment for why I believe that is actually too small.

If your answer is then that nobody is an expert, then my answer is that nobody should develop these systems since nobody knows how to achieve the minimum standard of safety. If it can not be done safely, then it should not be done at all no matter how hard you try if human lives are involved.

Re: New Google SRE book: Building Secure and Reliable Systems

#120

Post by pdeuchler »

pathseeker wrote: post #104
l9i wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were very much aware that not all companies can afford to staff a dedicated security team. We tried to do our best to make sure that the book is applicable to a wider audience: from startups, to big corporations. (disclaimer: I work at Google)

It's not as applicable to startups as you would think. The real calculation startups are making all of the time that this book doesn't mention is "is it worth making this particular piece scale/secure/robust before we run out of money?" While it's technically true that the advice would apply to startups in the sense that it would improve their reliability, the elephant in the room is that it doesn't matter. The engin…

The "is it doing X before we run out of money?" question is way overblown in startup land, usually by product people to skew developer time towards more features instead of much needed foundational work.

In reality, this question is almost always instantly answerable. You're either still building out your MVP and desperately need customers to validate your idea, in which case the answer is "No", or you're an established startup with runway and a growing customer base, in which case the answer is "Yes".

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