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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

#131

Post by gentleman11 »

caseydm wrote: post #77
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?

My favorite book on this topic is the DevOps Handbook. The author lays out a very clear and easy to follow path that gives you the same result: secure and reliable systems.

I found the devops handbook was very wordy and was both not concrete enough, and also did not make its arguments as strongly as it could have. I wasn’t able to get into it

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

#132

Post by gentleman11 »

sethvargo wrote: post #44
muro wrote: post #36

Looking at the authors, this book would be more about security, rather than reliability.

This is correct. This is the third book in our SRE series. It's reliability through the lens of security. Disclaimer: I work for Google

What is the focus of the others?

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

#133

Post by gentleman11 »

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

Are these books suitable for a software engineer who is new to security, or is it an advanced text with pre-reqs?

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

#134

Post by mandeepj »

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

Thank you. I wish you had also released an audio version of it

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

#135

Post by cameronbrown »

gentleman11 wrote: post #132
sethvargo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. This is the third book in our SRE series. It's reliability through the lens of security. Disclaimer: I work for Google

What is the focus of the others?

Much more general.

The first book is a solid overview of how Google does SRE and outlining each of the various concepts (error budgets, blameless culture, etc..). The second is more of a practical guide on deploying SRE into an organisation, a lessons learned type of book.

(I work for Google but not SRE, just enjoyed reading the books)

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

#136

Post by Scottopherson »

danso wrote: post #27

Off-topic: It made me chuckle to see this well-designed page, with great+free content, and also pulling in angular.js, doesn't follow Google's recommended practices for SERP, e.g. meta tags so that pasting the link into Slack, etc. displays some info rather than just the bare URL

Is there a Slack setting for this? I personally prefer bare URLs and always have to manually edit my messages to remove the URL info snippets.

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

#137

Post by cloakedarbiter »

laddng wrote: post #113
aoeuid wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm looking for reviews as well. FWIW, there's a list of table of contents available here: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at...

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

#138

Post by dodobirdlord »

kerng wrote: post #28
NOGDP wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search, gmail, maps, their ad systems...?

Weren't they all compromised by NSA, as well as China. And those are the issues that became public. Look up Operation Aurora for instance, or the famous slide deck that highlighted lack of encryption inside Google's network - and security intelligence even put a smile face there!

> Weren't they all compromised by NSA, as well as China. And those are the issues that became public. Look up Operation Aurora for instance

They caught the Chinese trying to compromise their systems, and stopped them before they got very far. In the process of investigating it was discovered that the Chinese had totally compromised a ton of other companies in the same operation. Sounds like top-tier security by Google. Nobody's perfect, and defending is so much harder than attacking that they're not even really the same industry.

> the famous slide deck that highlighted lack of encryption inside Google's network - and security intelligence even put a smile face there!

They hadn't reckoned on their own government physically tapping the network cables inside of their datacenters. And it's hard to blame them. Snowden's leaks wouldn't have been so shocking if they weren't, y'know, shocking. Once they added this to their threat model, they went and encrypted all internal traffic.

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

#139

Post by mkhalil »

kortilla wrote: post #128
pdeuchler wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 establis…

This doesn’t line up with my experience in startups. Security is never taken anywhere as seriously as all of the best practices (including this one) suggest. Same for cicd, etc.

Not to be dismissal - but that sound anecdotal.

I think it's best startups are provided with the most tools/options based on their priorities -- including the underlying lessons this book attempts to deliver - is the right path. Then it's up to their values and priorities.

Ignoring my startup experience (as they are all security-related and therefore took it serious), I believe startups that are handling any amount of customer data should be looking at security very seriously.

Now whether or not they do take it seriously is another problem, that doesn't mean the opportunities and advice shouldn't exist.

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

#140

Post by xemdetia »

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

Thanks for putting together this in a book, I feel like I've written this book multiple times for compliance and explained the concepts but sadly that doesn't cross employment barriers. Also annoyed that I didn't make the time to write a lesser variant of this book first. I just hope this book's PDF name doesn't make my new title 'SRS' on the resume going forward.
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