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Comment by sethvargo | Hacker News Reader

Hey everyone - Seth from Google here. Thank you for all the positive comments about the book. I'll be around to answer any questions you might have. As noted, the book can be downloaded for free in digital formats.

PDF: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/SRS.pdf

EPUB: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-epub.epub

MOBI: https://landing.google.com/sre/static/pdf/srs-mobi.mobi

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I really liked that there were HTML versions of the previous two books. Any chance that'll be up for this one?

A bit far-fetched but: Have you (or anyone else at Google) looked at Amazon Builder's Library [0] and/or various re:Invent / re:Inforce talks from 2018/19 [1][2] that focus on similar topics as in this book and other SRE books? If so, what are some ideas (infrastructure, blast radius, incident management, resilience, recovery, deployment strategies, crisis management, disaster planning, aftermath etc) you folks think that contrast / complement Google's approach to building hyperscale systems?

Thanks.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21714209

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22347694

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291163

I'll flag the HTML pages with the team. I'm honestly not sure. I know we're able to offer epub and mobi this time, something not previously possible with the other books.

I haven't looked at those other resources, but I'll ask if others have.

I actually wrote a script to convert the HTML version of the SRE book to epub, and then to mobi; which I then used to read a few chapters on kindle. It was far from perfect, but did the job.

Download the epub version and on the Linux command-line execute `tar -zxvf srs-epub.epub` then cd into unpacked `OEBPS/` folder and there's your HTML files. Not exactly what you are looking for, but you can browse the content in a web browser.

That doesn't work, unless you have an unusual Linux setup:

  $ tar -zxvf srs-epub.epub
  gzip: stdin has more than one entry--rest ignored
  tar: Child returned status 2
  tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

But you can do "unzip srs-epub.epub".

or right click on Windows and open with 7zip for example

Wouldn't you rather use unzip instead of tar? Epubs are just zipped HTML trees with a few extra files for the ebook structures.

No questions, just THANK YOU for this effort and for making it public.

We use it here to help expand people's minds, shifting their thinking from just writing applications to designing for large-scale HA systems, with all the fun pitfalls that lurk in a cloud.

There are multiple questions about what this book is about, who it's for and what might be relevant for me. We recommend going through the Preface to get answers to these questions. Copy/pasting a few paragraphs: "In this book we talk generally about systems, which is a conceptual way of thinking about the groups of components that cooperate to perform some function.

We wanted to write a book that focuses on integrating security and reliability directly into the software and system lifecycle, both to highlight technologies and practices that protect systems and keep them reliable, and to illustrate how those practices interact with each other.

We’d like to explicitly acknowledge that some of the strategies this book recommends require infrastructure support that simply may not exist where you’re currently working.

Because security and reliability are everyone’s responsibility, we’re targeting a broad audience: people who design, implement, and maintain systems. We’re challenging the dividing lines between the traditional professional roles of developers, architects, SREs, systems administrators, and security engineers.

Building and adopting the widespread best practices we recommend in this book requires a culture that is supportive of such change. We feel it is essential that you address the culture of your organization in parallel with the technology choices you make to focus on both security and reliability, so that any adjustments you make are persistent and resilient.

We recommend you start with Chapters 1 and 2, and then read the chapters that most interest you. Most chapters begin with a boxed preface or executive summary that outlines the following: • The problem statement • When in the software development lifecycle you should apply these principles and practices • The intersections of and/or tradeoffs between reliability and security to consider Within each chapter, topics are generally ordered from the most fundamental to the most sophisticated. We also call out deep dives and specialized subjects with an alligator icon."

Looks great — thanks Seth. Could you guys set the correct Content-Type on the EPUB? Should be application/epub+zip

Thanks for pointing this out, we're on it (other formats have a similar problem).

(disclaimer: I work at Google)

Actually the epub is so badly formatted, that Google Play Books does not even process it and fails. When i run it through epubchecker/Calibre, it shows 215 errors. Probably something you want to look at.

Thank you for letting us know Lucian! I shared your comment with our publisher (O'Reilly).

(disclaimer: I worked on the book)

Here is the patch for the faulty epub.css: https://gist.github.com/luckylittle/9a6d99def44a48796fbcb147...

Are these books suitable for a software engineer who is new to security, or is it an advanced text with pre-reqs?

Particularly the "Building Secure and Reliable Systems" is targeted to software engineers. Copy/paste from the preface: "Because security and reliability are everyone’s responsibility, we’re targeting a broad audience: people who design, implement, and maintain systems. We’re challenging the dividing lines between the traditional professional roles of developers, architects, SREs, systems administrators, and security engineers. While we’ll dive deeply into some subjects that might be more relevant to experienced engineers, we invite you—the reader — to try on different hats as you move through the chapters, imagining yourself in roles you (currently) don’t have and thinking about how you could improve your systems."

(Book author here)

This book should be suitable for software engineers without security background. There are some sections that might require some knowledge but they are explicitly marked as Deep Dive.

(disclaimer: I worked on the book)

Unrelated to the book, but wanted to drop a thank you, Seth. You're one of the best speakers I've had the pleasure of seeing (HashiConf) and are a great example to me of what to aim for in public tech talks.

I’m on mobile safari and the ePub and mobi files open as text. This means I can’t export them to Apple Books or the iOS kindle app. Could you please trigger a download instead if possible ?

Thanks for the feedback. This is a known issue that another user flagged this morning. The team is pursuing a fix. The content-type on the file is incorrect :/.

In the meantime, you can open it in a browser and email it to yourself. Not ideal, but a workaround.

[EDIT]: s/pursing/pursuing

I was wondering about that. I knew the native Books app supported both formats. Thanks for the quick response.

Thanks for sharing but can we not publish this straight on the web? It would be nice if access is frictionless.

I downloaded it on my Mac, airdropped it to my iPad, and that was able to send it to Bluefire Reader.

You can email the mobi version to your kindle app or the kindle device. You can get the email from your amazon account.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Thanks for putting together this in a book, I feel like I've written this book multiple times for compliance and explained the concepts but sadly that doesn't cross employment barriers. Also annoyed that I didn't make the time to write a lesser variant of this book first. I just hope this book's PDF name doesn't make my new title 'SRS' on the resume going forward.

Thank you. I wish you had also released an audio version of it

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