Reading DDIA as an SRE

Henry’s DDIA Notes

Over the past few weeks, to prepare for the system design interview, I read a book called DDIA (Designing Data-Intensive Applications). Not sure how much it will help my interview performance, but I truly enjoy it and have a brand new understanding of two past incidents.

This note shares my takeaways and initial thoughts of a real incident from SRE’s perspective.

Problem

It was a Friday morning and I was paged by a P1 alert showing that a key merchant’s payment request had dropped by 20%. Fortunately, as soon as I opened the dashboard, the service recovered automatically within one minute.