The Site Reliability Engineering Workbook Chapter: Simplicity

Niall Richard Murphy
Robert van Gent
Scott Ritchie
The Site Reliability Engineering Workbook: Practical Ways to Implement SRE (2018)
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Abstract

Simplicity is an important goal for SREs, as it strongly correlates with reliability: simple software breaks less often and is easier and faster to fix when it does break. Simple systems are easier to understand, easier to maintain, and easier to test.

For SREs, simplicity is end-to-end: it includes the code itself, the system architecture, and also the tools and processes used to manage the software lifecycle. In this chapter, we explore some examples that demonstrate how SREs can measure, think about, and encourage simplicity.