Part I. Introduction

This section provides some high-level guidance on what SRE is and why it is different from more conventional IT industry practices.

Ben Treynor Sloss, the senior VP overseeing technical operations at Google—and the originator of the term "Site Reliability Engineering"—provides his view on what SRE means, how it works, and how it compares to other ways of doing things in the industry, in Introduction.

We provide a guide to the production environment at Google in The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE as a way to help acquaint you with the wealth of new terms and systems you are about to meet in the rest of the book.