SRE Capacity Planning & Scaling 5

Question 1

What is 'graceful degradation' in the context of capacity planning?

Accepted Answer

Reducing feature functionality under overload rather than failing completely

Answer

Graceful degradation means intentionally shedding non-critical functionality under excess load to preserve core service availability and user experience.

Question 2

An SRE team uses the 'four golden signals' for capacity-related alerting. Which signal most directly indicates imminent capacity exhaustion?

Accepted Answer

Saturation

Answer

Saturation measures how full a resource is (CPU, memory, disk, network), making it the most direct indicator that capacity is being exhausted.

Question 3

Which technique allows a team to test system behavior under 2× production load without generating real user traffic?

Accepted Answer

Shadow traffic (dark launch) mirroring

Answer

Shadow traffic mirrors real production requests to a parallel environment, allowing load testing at scale with real patterns without impacting users.

Question 4

In vertical scaling, what is the primary limitation compared to horizontal scaling?

Accepted Answer

There is a hardware ceiling beyond which a single machine cannot be scaled further

Answer

Vertical scaling is bounded by the largest available hardware instance, whereas horizontal scaling can theoretically add unlimited nodes.

Question 5

What is 'traffic shaping' used for in capacity management?

Accepted Answer

Controlling the rate and distribution of incoming requests to protect backend capacity

Answer

Traffic shaping uses rate limiting, queuing, and throttling to control request flow so backends are not overwhelmed beyond their capacity.

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

SRE Capacity Planning & Scaling 5