Job role: site reliability engineer (SRE)
You tie reliability to measurable goals: SLOs, error budgets, cutting toil through automation, capacity and controlled failure experiments, raising a service's reliability over a quarter.
Level 401 · 15 lessons · 12 practice labs
Lessons
Measuring
- What SRE is and how it differs from sysadmin work
- Deriving SLIs from user journeys
- An SLO dashboard and error budget report
- Short task: set an SLO for a payment service and build its dashboard
Reducing toil
- A toil inventory: what to automate
- Self-healing services: safe automatic fixes
- Turning a runbook into a script
- Short task: automate a job that eats three hours a week
Resilience
- Failure modes and impact analysis
- Controlled failure experiments
- Capacity forecasting and load testing
- Safe releases: progressive rollout and automatic rollback
- Short task: stop a backend and prove the SLO holds
Wrap-up
- Post-incident culture and follow-through
- Capstone: measurably raise a service's reliability over a quarter
Practice labs
- Pick the right indicators for a service: From the demo service's metrics pick availability and latency indicators and find their current values by query.
- Set an SLO from measurements: Set a realistic target from thirty days of data, compute the error budget and add it to the dashboard.
- Write an error budget policy and apply it in a scenario: Write how deployments are restricted when the budget runs out, burn the budget with load and fault injection and apply the policy.
- Inventory the toil: From a week of on-call records list repeated manual tasks with frequency and duration and identify the costliest.
- Write a safe automatic remediation for a recurring alert: Write a clean-up automation with limits and logging for a full temp directory alert and test it only acts under the defined condition.
- Add an automatic rollback guardrail to deployment: Add to the deploy script a check that watches error rate and latency and returns to the previous version past a threshold, testing with a bad release.
- Find the single points of failure: Study the demo service's architecture and list the components whose failure stops the whole service.
- Run a controlled fault experiment: Write your hypothesis, stop one app instance, measure the user impact and compare it with the hypothesis.
- Set up load shedding and timeouts for overload: Push the load generator past capacity and use request limits, timeouts and retry settings so the service degrades instead of collapsing.
- Write an on-call handover with metrics: Prepare a handover note summarising the week's alert count, noisy alerts and open work.
- Clean up alerts nobody acts on: Review last month's alerts, remove or demote to a dashboard those needing no action and compute the fall in pages.
- Prepare a service's reliability review: For Göktaşı Yazılım's demo service write a quarterly review covering SLO status, incidents, toil and resilience experiments, with recommendations.
About this course
You tie reliability to measurable goals: SLOs, error budgets, cutting toil through automation, capacity and controlled failure experiments, raising a service's reliability over a quarter.
What you will learn
- Measuring
- Reducing toil
- Resilience
- Wrap-up
Prerequisites
You should have practised the topics of the same path up to level 301.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal in the browser, connected to a private lab network. Nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 401; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.