Software Systems

As increasingly complex software is developed every day, a growing number of companies use static analysis tools to reason about program properties ranging from simple coding style rules to more advanced software bugs, to multi-tier security vulnerabilities. While increasingly complex analyses are created, developer support must also be updated to ensure that the tools are used to their best...

Recent research has achieved impressive results on understanding and improving source code by building up on machine-learning techniques developed for natural languages. A significant advancement in natural-language understanding has come with the development of pre-trained contextual embeddings, such as BERT, which can be fine-tuned for downstream tasks with less labeled data and training...

Google has written the book on Site Reliability Engineering best practices, but how teams actually respond to production incidents often differs from the ideal practices we put on paper. This article will cover the reality of debugging issues in production at Google, including the types of tools, high-level strategies, and low-level tasks that engineers use in varying combinations to...

This article discusses principles and best practices for DevOps and SRE practitioners who are deploying and operating ML systems. This article draws on our experiences running production services for the past 15 years as well as from discussions with Google engineers working on diverse ML systems. We will use specific incidents to illustrate where ML-based systems did not behave as expected for...