Building Reliable Services on the Cloud

For a product or service to be successful, it must be reliable. Users need to trust that a service will be available when needed and that it won't lose the data it's entrusted to store. Outages erode trust and motivate users to seek and adopt alternatives; data loss is likely to destroy trust altogether. Delivering reliable systems, while maintaining high velocity and scalability, requires systematic resilience.

Google has designed, built, and operated reliable services on the cloud for decades. This report shows software engineers, site reliability engineers, and cloud engineers how to build similarly reliable services. Since reliability and resiliency are extremely large topics, this report introduces you to the most important concepts to keep in mind as you design and build systems.

This report helps you

Define objectives for your service to ensure it satisfies users while minimizing costs
Identify the dependencies you'll use to build a service so you can leverage them effectively
Architect your service by developing APIs, decomposing the system into components, and designing components to contribute to service objectives
Avoid common failure modes that can create outages or cause your service to miss objectives