I'm wondering if this has floated to the top of HN because of the recent GCP outages (both a few days ago and from this morning). I'm trying to figure out if this is coincidental or ironic.
NOTE: As a heavy user of GCP we we're affected by the three most recent outages (GCIC20005, GCIC20004, GCIC20003), but I definitely feel for those that were impacted.
Coincidence and irony aren't mutually exclusive. In any case, it's not surprising that free books about SRE have been noticed by HN users during a time of widescale quarantine.
The outages of sufficiently large and complex systems always have a kind of "are you frickin' kidding me?" aspect to them. It comes from crazy things nobody ever thought of, or the probabilities of single-throwing a dart through three separate keyholes in three different doors, or the unintended consequences of seemingly unrelated actions.
NOTE: As a heavy user of GCP we we're affected by the three most recent outages (GCIC20005, GCIC20004, GCIC20003), but I definitely feel for those that were impacted.