[SlightlyLeftPad]

This has really always been the case with Google philosophy docs. They tend to be very abstract and academic.

The biggest danger is taking everything at face value and structuring your work or organization the same exact way based solely on these documents. The reality is, the vast majority of companies are not Google and will never encounter Google’s problems. That’s not where the value is though.

[bbkane]

Maybe less of a philosophy doc, but I found the Google SRE workbook to have plenty of helpful concrete examples

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Of course, I’m not suggesting they don’t contain great examples. It’s just silly to apply the book wholesale to a company 1/100th the size of Google or even 1/10th the size of Google. It’ll almost never work verbatim. You must adapt it to the organization, resources, architecture you have and adjust the direction for where you need it to go.

Someone else made the point that the book itself is an idealistic view as a visionary document of what Google wants it to be but from someone sitting in the SRE role at Google, the role is probably not exactly as described.

[twalla]

The other thing to consider is a lot of the time these docs are sort of guidelines or wishlists for the way things ought to be - meanwhile an outside observer will assume these are the way things actually are.