Yeah, it is, but there's also a lot more to being a SRE than this book. This book more or less tells you how to stand up a reliability program, what it doesn't really indicate is what SREs do. A lot of people I meet think SRE is just the new title for "operator" which can't be farther from the truth. Whether you're doing an embedding model, like is referenced in the book, or you have a central org - both are made up of software and systems software engineers that are focused on performance and reliability. They build software, do analysis, and write policy that improve the bottom line reliability of the organization.

Not an SRE, but I think the main contribution from this book was to popularize terminology of operations (eg SLAs) and to give an opinionated perspective on how to handle operations at scale.

More practically, I don’t think the book is as useful, as it generally only makes sense when you reach a certain scale that few organizations ever do (imo).

However, we are heading into a future where computing will be everywhere and sensors in everything so in maybe a decade even the “smallest” of organizations may be responsible for large scale distributed systems and operating that would require concepts that are provided in the book.

As a non Googler myself, it still is if you want to know how to set up an SRE team and introduce SRE (ie good sysadmin, for lack of a better word) best practices. The focus on actual indicators such as SLI and SLO, the importance of reducing "toil" (boring repetitive tasks) and automating,... these are all valid concerns.

If you want more about system design and how to design reliability, I suggest reading https://google.github.io/building-secure-and-reliable-system...

yes, but not as a checklist of things you have to do, instead it's a valuable discussion of lots of problems and how they were solved in specific circumstances.

learn from it, don't copy from it.

The front half is for introducing ideas. The back chapters where never that great IMHO. They get both too in the weeds and at the same time missing actionable advice.