Basically any SRE advice for a normal service but replace/compliment HAproxy / nginx / ingress controller / ELB with the Tor daemon / OnionBalance.

I run Ablative Hosting and we have a few people who value uptime over anonymity etc and so we follow the usual processes for keeping stuff online.

Have multiples of everything (especially stuff that doesn't keep state), ensure you have monitoring of everything from connections, memory pressure, open files, free RAM etc etc.

Just think of the Tor daemon onion service as just a TCP reverse proxy, with load-balancing capability and then follow any other advice when it comes to building reliable infrastructure;

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Infrastructure-Code-Managing-Servers-Cloud/dp/1491924357/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Architecting-Scale-Lee-Atchinson/dp/1491943394/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Building-Microservices-Sam-Newman/dp/1491950358/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Monitoring-Mike-Julian/dp/1491957352/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cloud-Native-Infrastructure-Justin-Garrison/dp/1491984309/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Distributed-Systems-Brendan-Burns/dp/1491983647/
  
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Databases-at-Scale-Operations-Engineering/dp/1491925949/
  
  
  Once you've got to grips with running a reliable service then you can start layering your Onion reverse proxy / load balancing on top.
  
  
• Isolate your daemons from the clearnet (clearnet example; CloudFlare 'Access' suggests you only allow CloudFlare's IPs through your firewall guaranteeing that only traffic scrubbed by them reaches your servers)
  
• Configure Onionbalance (clearnet example; using keepalive-d / CARP / F5 LTMs to have redundancy for the ingress controller)
  
• Harden your software Unlike the clearnet examples of security you'll want to ensure that your software can't be 'tricked' into making a call to a hostile server (e.g. "Please fetch and attach content at this URL") - you can do this with tricks like Ablative's "QuadHop" setup or simply ensure that your software doesn't have such functionality.
  
  
  All of this aside, check /u/alecmuffett's "Onions that don't suck" repo for examples that are both well setup and stable.
  
  
  TL;DR; Tor is just a TCP reverse proxy with load balancer capabilities go learn some DevOps dodads
  
  Edit: As per Alec's comment - clarify that Tor is technically a reverse proxy with load-balancing capabilities rather than a straight up TCP load balancer.

I don't really have many good resources for you. I don't read a lot of technical books or websites/blogs outside of my day-to-day job. I've heard some pretty amazing things about Site Reliability Engineering and Effective DevOps, but I have yet to read either of them.

Overall, as you move forward in your career, I would encourage you to learn as much as you can about the ecosystem your code lives in. A lot of people who go into DevOps have really broad and comprehensible knowledge about the entire stack, all the way from networking and servers, to writing code, to building/deploying/hosting that code, to performance tuning that code, to logging and monitoring issues within the code, etc. Some developers really get stuck on "well, I've written the application, so I'm done, right?" but really there's a lot more to it and that's what DevOps people know and do.

My advice, don't worry about coding or experience in this or that solution.

Read, Read, Read!

Learn the discipline, the fundamentals, know what DevOps is.

Start with this:

https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X

I wouldn't say too early for having a good high-level overview of best practices.

It's always good to have a solid theoretical/philosophical understanding before diving into the specifics.

I'll put my vote down for Site Reliability Engineering as a good reference for high level ideas and less on the low level details.

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Sure I really enjoy these podcasts.

• .NET Rocks. Even if you don't do .NET they talk about high level concepts and talk to a lot of smart people on various things. on a recent podcast, they mentioned KataCoda which is an amazing site for learning docker. I had never heard of it.
  
  
• Hanselminutes. Great technology podcast.
  
  
• JavaScript Jabber
  
  
• Ruby Rogues
  
  As for books , here are some tech books I have read and enjoyed:
  
  
• Clean Code Amazing book on how to write good, maintainable code. It's language agnostic.
  
  
• The Clean Coder Same author as ^ but instead of code, focuses on being a professional developer and the skills needed to succeed in the industry.
  
  
• [Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems] (https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X) I'm reading this book now and it's a great look into how you maintain high scale web applications.
  
  
• Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams . Even if you're still learning, it's a good book to see what a good lead is like and hopefully one day you can grow into that role.
  
  
• Head First Design Patterns
  
  
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
  
  There's obviously a ton of other books, but those immediately come to mind.

If I were you I would look into the site reliability engineering book. The first few chapters address your question pretty well. The tl;dr version is don't guess. Get stakeholders (specifically management) to agree to a specific SLA target based on your needs and provide the funding necessary to hit those numbers.

Sysadmin, I've been doing Lead SysEng/DevOps/SRE for the past 4 years and literally have multiple written offers I'm trying to choose from right now.

I only started looking 3 weeks ago.

Learn multiple clouds(I've done the big 3 in prod and other ones for utils/tools/hobby/legacy systems), Kubernets/docker, Linux, distributed systems and ansible/puppet/chef


Read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Cloud-System-Administration-Practices/dp/032194318X/
and this:
https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X/


See if you can buy time for the internship offer, having multiple offers is always better :)
Is the internship paid?

The SRE book

https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X

This one

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Free Online: https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/149192912X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_wxJdAbNKAZKZH

The o'reilly "site reliability engineering" book was well worth reading imo

https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X/

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List

Read This First

1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment
   
   

   Fundamentals
   

   
   

2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
   
3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
   
4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
   
5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
   
6. Rework
   
7. Writing Secure Code
   
8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries
   
   

   Development Theory
   

   
   

9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
   
10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
    
11. Introduction to Functional Programming
    
12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
    
13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
    
14. Modern Operating Systems
    
15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
    
16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
    
17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    
    

    Philosophy of Programming
    

    
    

18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
    
19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
    
20. The Elements of Programming Style
    
21. A Discipline of Programming
    
22. The Practice of Programming
    
23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
    
24. Object Thinking
    
25. How to Solve It by Computer
    
26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts
    
    

    Mentality
    

    
    

27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
    
28. The Intentional Stance
    
29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
    
30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    
31. The Timeless Way of Building
    
32. The Soul Of A New Machine
    
33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
    
34. YOUTH
    
35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
    
    

    Software Engineering Skill Sets
    

    
    

36. Software Tools
    
37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
    
38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
    
39. Practical Parallel Programming
    
40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
    
41. Mastering Regular Expressions
    
42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
    
43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
    
44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
    
45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
    
46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
    
47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
    
48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.
    
    

    Design
    

    
    

49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
    
50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    
51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
    
52. The Non-Designer's Design Book
    
    

    History
    

    
    

53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
    
54. Death March
    
55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
    
56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
    
57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
    
58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line
    
    

    Specialist Skills
    

    
    

59. The Art of UNIX Programming
    
60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
    
61. Programming Windows
    
62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
    
63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
    
64. lex & yacc
    
65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
    
66. C Programming Language
    
67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
    
68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
    
69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
    
70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit
    
    

    DevOps Reading List
    

    
    

71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
    
72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
    
73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
    
74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
    
75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
    
76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
    
77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
    
78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
    
79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
    
80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud

Here's what I used to use:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521899435/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/149192912X/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_1?smid=A26MBA1SHJSNWL&psc=1

But here are some other good reads/materials:

http://www.aosabook.org/en/distsys.html

https://disco.ethz.ch/courses/podc_allstars/lecture/podc.pdf

I can't find the link I was thinking about, but here's a similar one: http://lms.uop.edu.jo/lms/pluginfile.php/2069/mod_resource/content/0/designing-distributed-systems-google-case-study.pdf

Google site reliability engineering wrote a book. Check it out.

You wanna be devops? Read how the best does it then take classes to answer everything you have questions about https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X

Grow a beard, read this book (http://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X) and apply for SRE jobs. Lots of them in Seattle, if my email inbox is any indicator.

I'm not joking about the beard.

>How did you get started in DevOps?

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4. I realised this was the future and if you wanted to be in a high performing organisation you need to do what they're doing.

Unless you're in an organisation that is willing to undergo the cultural change of Operations and Development working together you're probably not going to go far. Creating a devops organisation from scratch is HARD unless everyone is on board.

Looking into the technology is the simple part, try reading around the movement. Pheonix Project (http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/0988262509) is a good start, from there I'd look into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Integration-Improving-Software-Signature/dp/0321336380 & https://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912).

If by this point you don't know a programming language you're going to be in serious trouble. Learn something, be it Powershell (and honestly you probably will want to move onto C# if you want to be amazing at what you) or Python/Ruby.

Honestly you should be working towards what Google does with SRE if you want to be at the leading edge. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X.

Have you read https://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X already? It covers a bit of who/how they hire along with what they do. Might help some. Good luck!