SRE Classroom, or How to Build a Distributed System in 3 Hours

This workshop ties together academic and practical aspects of systems engineering, with an emphasis on applying principles of systems design to a production service. We will analyze the service to quantify its performance, and iteratively improve the design.

Participants will work together in small groups to sketch out the design, identify components and their relationships.

Participants will have a system design and bill of materials at the conclusion of this workshop.

Participants will not need laptops or specific coding experience; participants will need enthusiasm for collaborating in small groups, and for discussion-based problem-solving.

Pre-Reading List:

• CAP Twelve Years Later
• Raft
• Distributed systems in production environments
  • The Google File System
  • The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems
• Microsevices
  • Susan Fowler’s free eBook "Microservices in Production"
• Latency Numbers That Are Good To Know
• SRE Book Chapters
  • Service Level Objectives
  • Load Balancing at the Frontend
  • Load Balancing in the Datacenter
  • Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability
  • Data Integrity: What You Read Is What You Wrote

Prerequisites, Skills, and Tools:

• Participants will need enthusiasm for collaborating in small groups, and for discussion-based problem-solving
• Participants will work together, using pencil and paper
• Participants ought to be familiar with order-of-magnitude comparisons