Mastering DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering

DevOps and SRE have reshaped how modern engineering teams build and run systems. As modern organizations move away from manual ClickOps, understanding the synergy between DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering is vital for any engineer aiming to build reliable and scalable infrastructure.

This book provides a systematic journey through the professional lifecycle of a reliability engineer and draws from real experience rather than theory. It begins by establishing core skills in Kubernetes, IaaC, and networking before exploring the five pillars of SRE. You will learn to implement SLIs and SLOs, manage error budgets, and use chaos engineering for resilience. It also explores the human side of operations, including on-call practices, leadership, and growing your career in this field.

By the end of this book, you will have a grounded understanding of how modern infrastructure really works and what it takes to keep it healthy. Whether you are new to SRE or leading a DevOps team, this book gives you the tools, context, and perspective to build systems that last.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Master core principles of modern DevOps and SRE.
● Automate infrastructure with IaC and GitOps practices.
● Improve system health through observability, metrics, logging, and tracing.
● Design scalable, reliable, and secure cloud-native applications and platforms.
● Optimize cloud costs with effective budgeting, forecasting, and cost controls.
● Advance your career with interview strategies and leadership best practices.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for SREs, DevOps practitioners, developers, administrators, and cloud architects maintaining modern systems. It is also for those looking to step into this field and hoping to build a strong, practical foundation. The book also speaks to managers and technical leaders wanting a clearer view of how things work behind the scenes.

Section I: Introduction
1. Why DevOps and SRE
2. Essential Skills for SRE/DevOps Success
3. Foundational Pillars of SRE/DevOps
Section II: The Core Pillars and Foundational Practices
4. Observability as a Foundational Pillar
5. Scalability and Reliability
6. Security and Compliance
7. Developer Productivity
8. Mastering Cost Management
9. Infrastructure as Code and Automation
Section III: Operational Resilience and Practices
10. Blameless RCA
11. Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery
12. Managing On-call
13. Database Reliability Engineering
Section IV: Career and Leadership
14. Shaping Your Career in SRE/DevOps
15. Nailing SRE/DevOps Interview
16. Building an Effective SRE/DevOps Team
17. Advanced Patterns and Practices
Appendix

Ashish Gupta has spent more than 20 years in technology across engineering, operations, and leadership functions. He has worked both at large, global companies like Amazon and VMware and in startups of various sizes. Each phase of his career has given him insight into the reliability of systems and how they are built, scaled, and managed, especially when things go sideways.

During his career, he has earned the trust of his peers and leaders for clear communication and for helping teams turn complex ideas into meaningful improvements. He sees reliability engineering as one of the most challenging areas in technology because of the close interactions between people, processes, and the tools they depend on.

He wrote this book to share and simplify what he has learned from years of building, operating, and improving real systems. His goal is to offer practical and relevant ideas in SRE and DevOps for engineers, managers, and leaders who want to collaborate in building stronger, more reliable systems.