Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

by Betsy Beyer

Software engineering has this in common with having children: the labor before the birth is painful and difficult, but the labor after the birth is where you actually spend most of your effort. Yet software engineering as a discipline spends much more time talking about the first period as opposed to the second, despite estimates that 40–90% of the total costs of a system are incurred after birth.1 The popular industry model that conceives of deployed, operational software as being “stabilized” in production, and therefore needing much less attention from software engineers, is wrong. Through this lens, then, we see that if software engineering tends to focus on designing and building software systems, there must be another discipline that focuses on the whole lifecycle of software objects, from inception, through deployment and operation, refinement, and eventual peaceful decommissioning.