SRE Classroom exercises for non-abstract large systems design - Google Cloud

This resource first appeared in issue #43 on 25 Sep 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Systems: Other

SRE Classroom: exercises for non-abstract large systems design - Google Cloud

Google, which is notoriously close-lipped about technology development in the company, is getting more and more open with their training materials. This is terrific, because google takes training materials very seriously, and they’re quite good.

In Google’s systems reliability practice, they emphasize large systems design and “back of the envelope” estimation approaches which will seem quite familiar to those of us who were trained in the physical sciences. They teach this approach with quite concrete examples, their so-called “Non-abstract large systems design” (NALSD) examples. This lets them quickly evaluate the feasibility and tradeoffs of different approaches before they start building things. There’s a nice chapter in the SRE book working through a simple example.

They’ve just released a nice workshop on NALSD with a pub-sub worked example. In the package are slides, worksheets for attendees, and a workbook for workshop facilitators. It looks like a nice set of materials for you or a team member to work through if you’re curious about architecting these kinds of systems, or a cool afternoon course to offer within teams or externally.