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.