DevOps Site Reliability Engineering

Question 1

What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

Accepted Answer

A discipline that applies software engineering principles to operations to create scalable, reliable systems

Answer

SRE, originated at Google, treats operations as a software engineering problem, using code and automation to manage production systems and maintain reliability.

Question 2

What is an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

Accepted Answer

A formal contract with customers defining minimum service quality and remedies for failures

Answer

An SLA is a legally binding commitment to customers specifying uptime, performance, and support response standards with financial penalties for breaches.

Question 3

What is 'toil' in SRE terminology?

Accepted Answer

Manual, repetitive operational work that is automatable, tactical, and scales with service growth

Answer

SRE defines toil as work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, and grows proportionally with service load — teams aim to keep toil below 50% of work time.

Question 4

What is chaos engineering?

Accepted Answer

Deliberately injecting failures into a system to test its resilience and identify weaknesses before they cause incidents

Answer

Chaos engineering (e.g., Netflix's Chaos Monkey) proactively breaks things in controlled ways to discover failure modes and verify that systems handle them gracefully.

Question 5

What is an incident post-mortem?

Accepted Answer

A blameless analysis after an incident to understand root causes and prevent recurrence

Answer

A blameless post-mortem focuses on systemic causes rather than individual blame, documenting the timeline, contributing factors, and action items to prevent recurrence.

DevOps Practice Test

DevOps Practice Test

DevOps Site Reliability Engineering