The books read quite easy. The first book is just stories from google; it doesn’t really prescribe anything- it’s a collection of people talking about what SRE means to them and also how it fits together with “devops”.

The second book (the SRE workbook) is more prescriptive, walks through practical ways of implementing it.

The most base description of SRE principles is simply that:

1) You automate aggressively and develop or use self-service tools as much as possible (over ops work)

2) you define what “availability” really means; institute an allowance of errors based on budget. Highly reliable systems should get much more attention and budget than lower requirement systems. Make an SLO dashboard; alert based on your “error budget” being eaten too quickly.

3) try to avoid allowing your staff to work more than 50% on operations work; that’s your indicator for being overloaded.

Anecdata: some people disbelieve this ≤50% ops time figure. At the moment my SRE team is getting some flak for exceeding 30%, which exceeds the PA's guideline of 20% for the wrong reasons.

If somebody was in a hurry, which sections of which book should they start with?

SRE Book (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/toc/index.html): Chapters 4, 5, 6, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, All the Appendixes

SRE Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/toc/): Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, All the Appendixes

Check out the YouTube videos on SRE by the Seth Vargo and friends at Google.

There's quite a few resources. Liz and I did a video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTEL8Ff1Zvk and blog series: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-vs-devops-com.... It's about 50min of content, but it's framed through a slightly different lens. There's also a coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/site-reliability-engineerin...

Disclaimer: I work for Google

Just take an hour to watch the 2014 SRECon keynote from Ben Treynor.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/technical-session...

The first book's first 3 chapters are readable, then descends onto hell of manager talk, btw, despite Google talking heads. You're not crazy. This is blah blah mid and small companies do not need or want.

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

Read one chapter, put it to work, repeat.

Shame you got downvoted for what seems a reasonable request.