howtheysre
How They SRE is a curated knowledge repository documenting Site Reliability Engineering practices, tools, and culture from leading technology organizations. It aggregates publicly shared insights from engineering blogs, conferences, and meetups across topics like monitoring, incident response, chaos engineering, and on-call management.
Key facts
Objective fields from the source. Values we can't verify are shown as “Unknown” rather than guessed.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Repository | upgundecha/howtheysre |
| Owner | upgundecha |
| Primary language | JavaScript |
| License | CC0-1.0 — Requires review (not clearly OSI) |
| Stars | 9.8k |
| Forks | 887 |
| Open issues | 11 |
| Latest release | Unknown |
| Last updated | 2025-11-17 |
| Source | https://github.com/upgundecha/howtheysre |
What howtheysre is
A community-maintained knowledge base (JavaScript/web format) indexing SRE methodologies, architectural patterns, and operational practices from organizations including Airbnb, Atlassian, and Bloomberg. Content spans alerting frameworks, Kubernetes scaling, observability, incident postmortems, and chaos engineering approaches.
Get the howtheysre source
Clone the repository and explore it locally.
git clone https://github.com/upgundecha/howtheysre.gitcd howtheysre# follow the project's README for install & configurationNeed it deployed, integrated, or customized instead? DEV.co ships production installs.
Best use cases
Implementation considerations
- Content is curated from external sources (blogs, conferences, videos); verify practices against your organizational context before adoption.
- Topics span infrastructure (Kubernetes, cloud), monitoring tools (varied), and process (incident response, on-call)—use as reference, not prescriptive.
- Examples come from large-scale organizations (Airbnb, Alibaba, Bloomberg); patterns may require adaptation for smaller teams or different maturity levels.
- No standardized framework is enforced; select practices relevant to your tech stack and incident volume.
- Resources are self-curated by maintainer(s); completeness and recency of coverage varies by topic and organization.
When to avoid it — and what to weigh
- Need Executable Code or Tools — This is a curated reference and knowledge repository, not a software toolkit or runnable framework. It links to external resources but does not provide code implementations to deploy directly.
- Seeking Vendor-Specific Solutions — The collection is tool-agnostic and focuses on principles and practices. If you need a specific monitoring platform, incident management system, or CI/CD tool, use vendor documentation instead.
- Require Real-Time Operational Data — Content is static case studies and blog posts. For live metrics, alerts, or dashboards, use operational monitoring platforms (Prometheus, DataDog, etc.) instead.
- Need Proprietary or Confidential Details — Repository contains only publicly available information. Sensitive internal practices, compliance frameworks, or proprietary architectures are not included.
License & commercial use
CC0-1.0 (Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal) allows unrestricted use, modification, and distribution without attribution requirements. Content is public domain equivalent.
CC0-1.0 permits commercial use without restriction. However, this applies to the repository content and curation only. External resources linked (blog posts, videos, conference talks) retain their original licenses and terms—verify those before commercial reuse. The repository itself carries no licensing restrictions on redistribution or derivative use.
DEV.co evaluation signals
Editorial assessment — not user reviews. Directional, with an explicit confidence level.
| Signal | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Maintenance | Active |
| Documentation | Strong |
| License clarity | Clear |
| Deployment complexity | Low |
| DEV.co fit | Good |
| Assessment confidence | High |
Repository itself poses minimal security risk—it is a static knowledge base. However: (1) external links may become stale or compromised; verify sources before implementing; (2) practices from other organizations may not suit your threat model or compliance requirements; (3) no security audit framework is provided—use this to inform decisions, not as security compliance documentation; (4) code snippets or tools referenced externally should be reviewed for vulnerabilities before production use.
Alternatives to consider
Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Landscape & Docs
Provides tools and architectures for Kubernetes, observability, and cloud-native SRE. More implementation-focused than How They SRE, but narrower scope (primarily cloud-native stack).
SRE Book (Google) & Workbook
Foundational SRE theory and practices from Google. More authoritative and prescriptive than a curated collection, but less contemporary organization case studies.
Platform Engineering Community (CNCF, Gartner)
Focuses on platform teams and infrastructure automation. Overlaps with SRE practices but emphasizes internal developer platforms vs. broader reliability culture.
Build on howtheysre with DEV.co software developers
Explore real-world SRE strategies from leading organizations. Use How They SRE to guide your team's reliability culture, incident response, and observability design.
Talk to DEV.coRelated open-source tools
Surfaced by semantic similarity across the DEV.co open-source index.
Related on DEV.co
Explore the category and the services that help you build with it.
howtheysre FAQ
Can I use this repository commercially?
Is this a software tool or library I can install?
How frequently is the repository updated?
Are practices suitable for my organization?
Work with a software development agency
Need help beyond evaluating howtheysre? DEV.co is a software development agency offering software development services and web development for teams of every size. Our software developers and web developers build custom software, web applications, APIs, and open-source devops integrations — and maintain them long-term.
Build Reliable Systems with SRE Best Practices
Explore real-world SRE strategies from leading organizations. Use How They SRE to guide your team's reliability culture, incident response, and observability design.