SRE classroom: How to design a reliable application in three hours (sponsored by Google)

Description

Outline:

Goals and expectations

• We have a problem. Let’s solve it with software
• The initial problem statement
• The service-level objective (SLO)
• Terminology and concepts
• Hardware (memory, processor)
• Software (libraries, invariants)
• Distributed
• Hardware (data center, network)
• Software (algorithms, failures)
• What is distributed consensus? Why is it important?
• Hands-on exercise: Identify the components necessary to build a working system in a single location and produce a sketch of this working system (UML not required)

The solution has limitations: Let’s improve it

• We have identified single points of failure…because things failed. The system failed. And we lost users.
• Let’s replicate this thing.
• What parts are useful to duplicate? Replicate? How do we arrange this so that we make the computers do all the work?
• How do we know that these systems are doing what we expect?
• We have performance bottlenecks
• How do we identify bottlenecks?
• Conversely, how do we know that we have removed these bottlenecks?
• How can we apply these concepts to a real piece of software?
• What limitations does this introduce?
• Hands-on exercise: Identify which components can usefully run in multiple locations; evaluate how to write an SLO (and how to apply it) and produce a system that runs in multiple data centers

Discussion and conclusions

• Present an example solution
• Discuss commonly encountered limitations
• What key points have we learned?
• How does it apply beyond this workshop?
• Assessing and evaluating third-party (i.e., cloud) systems integrating these into your design
• Hands-on exercises

For each exercise, you’ll work in ​small ​groups to apply the concepts to the problem. As Jesus Climent discusses additional aspects of distributed-systems design, you’ll apply these concepts to your in-progress solutions.

This tutorial is sponsored by Google.