Waterfall charts are diagrams which represent how website resources are being downloaded, parsed by the engine, in a timeline that gives us the opportunity to see the sequence and dependencies between resources. It assists in identifying where important events happened during the loading process. They can also let the user easily see how good or bad the performance of their website is, showing you exactly what is slowing down your site.

As a typical Internet user, nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a web page to display, only to receive a “Page Not Found” 404 error status code. Sure, we try reloading the page, and sometimes that gets the gremlins to start working, but most times, the issue is out of our hands. For all of us typical users, we either go onto the next thing or find a different site. There’s a lot going on in the background that most of us are completely unaware of.

The role and responsibilities of a site reliability engineer (SRE) may vary depending on the size of the organization, and as such, so do site reliability engineer tools. For the most part, a site reliability engineer is focused on multiple tasks and projects at one time, so for most SREs, the various tools they use reflect their eve-evolving responsibilities.

In the world of a site reliability engineer (SRE), failure is not only an option, but also expected. Systems, web applications, servers, devices, etc., are all prone to performance issues and unexpected outages at some point. It is an unavoidable fact. These unexpected failures can lead to huge revenue losses, customer trust and depending on the industry, maybe fines. Fortunately, SRE incident management is one of the core practices used to limit the disruption caused by unexpected issues.

There was a time when standing up a website or application was simple and straightforward and not the complex networks they are today. Web developers or administrators did not have to worry or even consider the complexity of distributed systems of today. The recipe was straightforward. Do you have a database? Check. Do you have a web server? Check. Great, your system was ready to be deployed.