Just published a great podcast interview with Betsy Beyer and Stephen Thorne of Google, coauthors of the incredible “Site Reliability Engineering Workbook”. We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including how Google learns from failures, what toil is and how good organizations try to fight it, and when LESS reliability can be a good thing in software development.

Betsy and Stephen’s work around publicizing and breaking down the myths surrounding SRE have been huge boons to our industry. Their writing (along with a few other Googlers) had a big impact on the Achieving DevOps book; we find their work and thinking incredibly helpful and influential. You’ll love it too!

A link to the interview is here – and it’s on the podcast platform of your choice. Apple, Google, Spotify, blah blah…. We’re on all the major platforms now, including Anchor, Apple, Google, Spotify, PocketCasts, and RadioPublic. Please support the podcast, and we’d love to hear your feedback about the book!

Enjoy the podcast!

Some link goodness:

• Link to SRE landing page: https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
  
• SRE workbook online for free: https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/
  
• On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsy-beyer/ | Stephen Thorne
  
• Niall Murphy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/niallm?lang=en
  
• My original interview with them is here
  
• The Google landing site for SRE – https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html – free PDF versions of the revised [sre] text and the followup handbook. This should be must-read material for anyone out there, from IT practitioner to CXO exec.
  
• “Managing Misfortune for Best Results” by Kieran Barry at the SREcon EMEA, https://www.usenix.org/node/218852. This is a great overview of the Wheel of Misfortune exercises in simulating outages for training, and some antipatterns to avoid.
  
• The Google landing page Betsy mentioned with lots of rich content – https://landing.google.com/sre/
  
• Advance copies of Betsy’s next book can be reserved on Amazon. “Building Secure and Reliable Systems: SRE and Security Best Practices”