Tag Archives: google

Building Secure and Reliable Systems at Google

I recently started reading Building Secure and Reliable Systems, which was authored by various folks at Google (some of whom I know). Since my work is at the intersection of so much of this — reliable logging systems which must also be secure, it’s an interesting read.

In my experience, the most challenging part about securing our systems are the constant trade-offs one needs to make. Since no system can be made 100% secure, knowing where the marginal risk is no longer worth addressing is quite difficult — I’m hoping this book improves my ability to make these trade-offs correctly.

Meaningful Uptime Measurements for the Cloud

Another interesting paper came my way, thanks to the Morning Paper mailing list. Nines are Not Enough:Meaningful Metrics for Clouds discusses a topic that I deal with regularly in my role at Google.

SLIs, SLOs, and SLA are easy to discuss in a general sense, but surprisingly subtle to put into practise. This paper, authored by Google engineers, explores why this is so, and offers a new framework for thinking about them.

How I handle my Gmail load at Google

As an Engineering Manager at Google, I get a lot of email — everyone does. Google — at least my group — doesn’t make heavy use of IM-like tools internally, and I’m happy about that. Combined with traffic from the internal system, it all adds up to a lot in my Inbox.

So I was forced to really think about how I handle it all — and not miss anything important.

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