GCP Staff-Level System Design & SRE Deep Dive

Target audience: Engineers aiming for staff/SRE-level depth in GCP, distributed systems, and production reliability.
Goal: Understand internals, failure modes, and tradeoffs at the depth expected of senior staff engineers and SREs at Google.

Quick Start

1. New to the repo? Start here: docs
2. Want a guided path? Follow the Learning Path section in the index.
3. Looking for a specific topic? Use the Reference Map section.
4. Track your progress: Check off items in docs/PROGRESS.md

Structure

docs/
├── 00-meta/          # Templates, glossary, learning principles
├── 01-foundations/    # Quantitative reasoning, capacity math, mental models
├── 02-distributed-systems/  # Consensus, replication, ordering, overload
├── 03-gcp-core-building-blocks/  # VPC, GKE, IAM, Spanner, Bigtable, etc.
├── 04-reliability-sre/  # SLIs/SLOs, PRRs, postmortems, capacity planning
├── 05-llD-patterns/  # Idempotency, rate limiting, circuit breakers
└── 06-case-studies/  # End-to-end system designs with ops playbooks

How to Use This Repo

As a Curriculum

• Follow the phases in order (Phase 0 → Phase 4)
• Complete exercises and deep dives before moving on
• Use docs/PROGRESS.md to track milestones

As a Reference

• Jump to specific topics via the Reference Map
• Use templates in 00-meta/ for your own deep dives
• Cross-reference related concepts using the links

Depth Standards

Every deep dive includes: - Mental model: How to think about the system - Internals: Implementation details and architecture - Failure modes: What breaks and why - Overload behavior: Behavior at 10×, 100× load - Observability: What to measure and where - Change safety: Rollout strategies and reversibility - Security boundaries: Identity, authorization, data protection - Tradeoffs: What you gain/lose with each choice

Contributing

When adding new content: 1. Use the templates in docs/00-meta/ 2. Maintain staff-level depth (see guardrails in INDEX.md) 3. Cross-link related topics 4. Update INDEX.md and PROGRESS.md

License

This is a personal learning repository. Use freely for your own education.