Site Reliability Engineering: A Complete Guide
You're under pressure. Systems are failing. Alerts keep coming. Stakeholders demand uptime you can't guarantee. And deep down, you know reactive firefighting isn't the answer. You need to shift from chaos to control - from being the person who puts out fires to the engineer who designs fireproof infrastructure. That shift is real. It’s happening right now in engineering teams at Google, Netflix, and Amazon. And it’s powered by one role: the Site Reliability Engineer. Someone who combines deep software expertise with operational rigor to build systems that don’t just work - they thrive under stress, scale effortlessly, and deliver measurable business value. Site Reliability Engineering: A Complete Guide is not just another technical manual. It’s your proven roadmap to transform from an overwhelmed operations engineer or software developer into a strategic, high-impact SRE. This course gives you the exact frameworks, practices, and tools used by elite engineering organisations - distilled into a repeatable, structured path anyone can follow. In just 30 days, you can go from uncertainty to having a fully documented incident response protocol, automated reliability metrics dashboard, and a service-level objectives framework your CTO would approve. Mark T., Senior DevOps Engineer at a Fortune 500 financial services firm, used this exact methodology to reduce system outages by 72% in six weeks and was fast-tracked for a promotion to SRE Lead. You don’t need permission to become indispensable. You need clarity. A systematic way to measure, improve, and prove reliability. And a credential recognised across the industry that validates your expertise. This course delivers all three. Here’s how this course is structured to help you get there.Course Format & Delivery Details Fully Self-Paced, Immediate Online Access
The journey to mastery begins the moment you enroll. There are no fixed start dates, no live sessions to attend, and no time-based obligations. You control your pace, your schedule, and your progress. Whether you’re fitting this around full-time work or accelerating through the material in a focused sprint, the structure supports your success. Typical learners complete the course in 4 to 6 weeks, dedicating just 6 to 8 hours per week. Real-world results appear within days - automation scripts deployed, error budgets defined, SLIs finalised - giving you immediate confidence and visibility into your growing capabilities. Lifetime Access & Ongoing Updates
This is not a time-limited course. Once enrolled, you receive lifetime access to all content, tools, and templates. Every future update - new modules, refined frameworks, updated industry standards - is included at no additional cost. As SRE evolves, your knowledge stays current, ensuring your investment compounds over time. Accessible Anywhere, On Any Device
Access your materials 24/7 from any desktop, tablet, or mobile device. The platform is fully responsive, ensuring readability and navigation efficiency across environments. Whether you’re reviewing postmortem templates on your phone while commuting or drafting service-level agreements on your laptop at home, your progress is uninterrupted. Comprehensive Instructor Support & Expert Guidance
While the course is self-directed, you are never alone. You gain direct access to seasoned SRE practitioners through structured support channels. Ask specific technical questions, submit architecture reviews, and receive detailed feedback on your implementation plans. This isn’t automated chatbot support - it’s real expertise from engineers who’ve designed reliability systems at scale. Industry-Recognised Certification
Upon successful completion, you earn a Certificate of Completion issued by The Art of Service. This credential is globally recognised, cited on LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and internal promotion packages. Organisations like JPMorgan Chase, IBM, and Siemens actively recruit using The Art of Service certifications as a benchmark for technical competency and operational excellence. Clear, Transparent Pricing: No Hidden Fees
You pay one straightforward price. There are no recurring charges, upsells, or surprise fees. Everything you need is included - curriculum, tools, templates, support, and certification. Accepted Payment Methods
- Visa
- Mastercard
- PayPal
Risk-Free Enrollment: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee
If this course doesn’t deliver practical value within your first two modules, request a full refund. No questions, no hoops. We stand behind the transformational impact of this program because we’ve seen thousands of engineers use it to break into SRE roles, lead reliability initiatives, and drive measurable reductions in system downtime. Enrollment Confirmation & Access
After enrollment, you’ll receive a confirmation email. Your course access details will be sent separately once your materials are prepared and verified for delivery. This ensures you receive a polished, high-integrity learning experience every time. This Works Even If:
- You’ve never held the title of SRE - this course builds your skills from foundational principles to advanced practice.
- Your current team doesn’t use SLOs or error budgets - you’ll gain the tools to introduce them with confidence.
- You come from a non-software background - the curriculum bridges operations, development, and systems thinking seamlessly.
- You’re unsure if your organisation values reliability engineering - you’ll learn how to quantify ROI and build executive buy-in.
This isn’t theoretical. It’s tactical. Trusted. Battle-tested. And designed specifically for professionals who are ready to stop reacting and start leading.
Module 1: Foundations of Site Reliability Engineering - Understanding the SRE role: Definition, purpose, and evolution
- Historical context: From sysadmin to SRE at Google and beyond
- Key differences between DevOps, operations, and SRE
- The engineering mindset in operations
- Core responsibilities: Availability, latency, performance, efficiency
- Measuring success: Uptime, incident frequency, team health
- The importance of automation in reducing toil
- Defining toil: Characteristics, impact, and identification
- Balancing feature development with operational work
- The SRE’s role in software development lifecycle
- Service ownership models and team accountability
- Eng on-call rotations and burnout prevention
- Engineering for resilience: Proactive vs reactive design
- Understanding technical debt in system reliability
- Incorporating SRE principles into agile workflows
- Stakeholder communication: Aligning engineering with business goals
- Establishing reliability as a shared responsibility
- SRE maturity models and organisational readiness assessment
- The role of documentation in reducing cognitive load
- Creating a culture of blameless problem solving
Module 2: Reliability Frameworks and Service Level Objectives - Introduction to service level indicators (SLIs)
- Selecting meaningful SLIs: Latency, availability, durability, correctness
- Service level objectives (SLOs): Definition and strategic importance
- Translating business requirements into SLOs
- Setting realistic targets: The 9s (99%, 99.9%, 99.99%) and their implications
- Choosing appropriate measurement windows: Calendar month, rolling average
- Error budgets: Concept, calculation, and policy enforcement
- Using error budgets to drive product decisions
- The consequences of exhausting an error budget
- Service level agreements (SLAs): Legal and contractual implications
- Differentiating internal SLOs from external SLAs
- Aligning SLOs across microservices and dependencies
- Handling cascading failures through SLO design
- Monitoring for compliance: Automating SLO validation
- Visualising SLO health with dashboards
- Alerting on SLO burn rate: Predictive failure detection
- Managing exceptions: When to pause or adjust SLOs
- Creating organisational SLO policies
- Communicating SLO status to non-technical stakeholders
- Integrating SLOs into incident response protocols
Module 3: Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry - The limits of traditional monitoring vs modern observability
- Three pillars of observability: Logs, metrics, traces
- Designing high-cardinality event logging
- Structured logging: JSON, correlation IDs, metadata tagging
- Choosing log aggregation tools: ELK, Splunk, Loki
- Metrics collection: Push vs pull models, Prometheus best practices
- Defining key operational metrics: QPS, p95 latency, CPU, memory
- Instrumenting applications for observability
- Distributed tracing: Understanding request flows across services
- Implementing OpenTelemetry standards
- Building custom dashboards for team-level visibility
- Creating executive summary dashboards
- Detecting anomalies with statistical baselining
- Setting appropriate thresholds and alerting boundaries
- Reducing alert noise through intelligent grouping
- Using health checks and synthetic monitoring
- Monitoring for performance degradation trends
- Telemetry sampling strategies and cost control
- Ensuring secure transmission of telemetry data
- Regulatory compliance in log retention and access
Module 4: Incident Management and Response - Stages of incident lifecycle: Detection, response, resolution, review
- Designing an effective incident command structure
- Role-based responsibilities during outages
- Incident severity classification framework
- Escalation paths and communication trees
- Automated incident detection and notification workflows
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
- Standardising incident response playbooks
- Using incident management platforms (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
- Effective communication during outages: Internal and external
- Drafting real-time status updates for stakeholders
- Minimising cognitive overload during high-pressure events
- Using war rooms and chat channels effectively
- Post-incident documentation: Timelines, decisions, actions
- Measuring incident duration and resolution effectiveness
- Conducting blameless postmortems
- Identifying root causes vs symptoms
- Writing actionable postmortem reports
- Prioritising follow-up actions and remediation items
- Tracking postmortem action items to closure
- Building organisational learning from failures
Module 5: Automation and Toil Reduction - Identifying toil: Repetitive, manual, automatable tasks
- Classifying tasks by automation feasibility
- The 50% automation rule: SRE capacity allocation
- Choosing the right programming language for automation (Python, Go)
- Building reliable scripts: Error handling, idempotency, logging
- Version controlling automation code
- Testing automation workflows before deployment
- Automating deployment rollbacks
- Self-healing infrastructures: Auto-restart, auto-scale, auto-repair
- Automating certificate renewals and configuration updates
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for reliability
- Using Terraform for consistent environment provisioning
- Automating security patching and CVE remediation
- Trigger-based automation: Event-driven workflows
- CI/CD pipelines with reliability gates
- Automated canary analysis and rollouts
- Reducing manual configurations through templates
- Automated consistency checks across environments
- Measuring toil reduction impact over time
- Documenting automated systems for team onboarding
Module 6: Release Engineering and Deployment Reliability - The SRE role in software releases
- Deployment strategies: Blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags
- Implementing progressive delivery
- Rollback strategies and rollback testing
- Health checks during deployments
- Built-in canary analysis with automated metrics validation
- Defining deployment windows and risk budgets
- Automating pre-deployment checklist validation
- Managing database migrations safely
- Zero-downtime deployment patterns
- Tracking deployment success rates over time
- Release approval workflows involving SRE
- Creating deployment dashboards with real-time status
- Integrating SLOs into release criteria
- Deployment throttling based on error budget consumption
- Feature flag management and kill switch implementation
- Managing configuration drift during releases
- Using dark launches for testing in production
- Release postmortems for failed or unstable deployments
- Continuous benchmarking of deployment performance
Module 7: Scalability and Capacity Planning - Understanding system scaling: Vertical vs horizontal
- Predicting load growth patterns
- Load testing strategies and tools (k6, Locust, JMeter)
- Designing for graceful degradation under load
- Backpressure mechanisms and rate limiting
- Auto-scaling configurations and thresholds
- Queue management and task prioritisation
- Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, partitioning
- Content delivery networks and edge caching
- Capacity planning based on business projections
- Resource forecasting models
- Benchmarking system performance at scale
- Identifying bottlenecks in distributed systems
- Cost-performance trade-offs in infrastructure scaling
- Right-sizing cloud instances for optimal TCO
- Managing cold starts in serverless environments
- Scaling stateful vs stateless services
- Designing for regional failover and disaster recovery
- Capacity dashboards and early warning systems
- Communicating capacity constraints to product teams
Module 8: Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing - Introduction to chaos engineering principles
- The steady-state hypothesis and expected behaviour
- Designing controlled experiments to test system resilience
- Tools for chaos engineering: Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus
- Implementing chaos experiments in staging environments
- Gradual rollout: Starting small, increasing blast radius
- Automating chaos injection as part of CI/CD
- Validating recovery mechanisms through failure tests
- Measuring recovery time objectives (RTO)
- Testing redundancy and failover mechanisms
- Network partition testing and latency injection
- CPU, memory, and disk stress testing
- Testing third-party service failure scenarios
- Scheduling chaos experiments without disrupting users
- Danger zones: When not to run chaos experiments
- Documenting findings and improving system design
- Building organisational trust in resilience testing
- Integrating chaos results into incident response plans
- Creating a resilience scorecard for services
- Certifying services as “chaos-ready”
Module 9: Distributed Systems Design for Reliability - Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Understanding the SRE role: Definition, purpose, and evolution
- Historical context: From sysadmin to SRE at Google and beyond
- Key differences between DevOps, operations, and SRE
- The engineering mindset in operations
- Core responsibilities: Availability, latency, performance, efficiency
- Measuring success: Uptime, incident frequency, team health
- The importance of automation in reducing toil
- Defining toil: Characteristics, impact, and identification
- Balancing feature development with operational work
- The SRE’s role in software development lifecycle
- Service ownership models and team accountability
- Eng on-call rotations and burnout prevention
- Engineering for resilience: Proactive vs reactive design
- Understanding technical debt in system reliability
- Incorporating SRE principles into agile workflows
- Stakeholder communication: Aligning engineering with business goals
- Establishing reliability as a shared responsibility
- SRE maturity models and organisational readiness assessment
- The role of documentation in reducing cognitive load
- Creating a culture of blameless problem solving
Module 2: Reliability Frameworks and Service Level Objectives - Introduction to service level indicators (SLIs)
- Selecting meaningful SLIs: Latency, availability, durability, correctness
- Service level objectives (SLOs): Definition and strategic importance
- Translating business requirements into SLOs
- Setting realistic targets: The 9s (99%, 99.9%, 99.99%) and their implications
- Choosing appropriate measurement windows: Calendar month, rolling average
- Error budgets: Concept, calculation, and policy enforcement
- Using error budgets to drive product decisions
- The consequences of exhausting an error budget
- Service level agreements (SLAs): Legal and contractual implications
- Differentiating internal SLOs from external SLAs
- Aligning SLOs across microservices and dependencies
- Handling cascading failures through SLO design
- Monitoring for compliance: Automating SLO validation
- Visualising SLO health with dashboards
- Alerting on SLO burn rate: Predictive failure detection
- Managing exceptions: When to pause or adjust SLOs
- Creating organisational SLO policies
- Communicating SLO status to non-technical stakeholders
- Integrating SLOs into incident response protocols
Module 3: Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry - The limits of traditional monitoring vs modern observability
- Three pillars of observability: Logs, metrics, traces
- Designing high-cardinality event logging
- Structured logging: JSON, correlation IDs, metadata tagging
- Choosing log aggregation tools: ELK, Splunk, Loki
- Metrics collection: Push vs pull models, Prometheus best practices
- Defining key operational metrics: QPS, p95 latency, CPU, memory
- Instrumenting applications for observability
- Distributed tracing: Understanding request flows across services
- Implementing OpenTelemetry standards
- Building custom dashboards for team-level visibility
- Creating executive summary dashboards
- Detecting anomalies with statistical baselining
- Setting appropriate thresholds and alerting boundaries
- Reducing alert noise through intelligent grouping
- Using health checks and synthetic monitoring
- Monitoring for performance degradation trends
- Telemetry sampling strategies and cost control
- Ensuring secure transmission of telemetry data
- Regulatory compliance in log retention and access
Module 4: Incident Management and Response - Stages of incident lifecycle: Detection, response, resolution, review
- Designing an effective incident command structure
- Role-based responsibilities during outages
- Incident severity classification framework
- Escalation paths and communication trees
- Automated incident detection and notification workflows
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
- Standardising incident response playbooks
- Using incident management platforms (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
- Effective communication during outages: Internal and external
- Drafting real-time status updates for stakeholders
- Minimising cognitive overload during high-pressure events
- Using war rooms and chat channels effectively
- Post-incident documentation: Timelines, decisions, actions
- Measuring incident duration and resolution effectiveness
- Conducting blameless postmortems
- Identifying root causes vs symptoms
- Writing actionable postmortem reports
- Prioritising follow-up actions and remediation items
- Tracking postmortem action items to closure
- Building organisational learning from failures
Module 5: Automation and Toil Reduction - Identifying toil: Repetitive, manual, automatable tasks
- Classifying tasks by automation feasibility
- The 50% automation rule: SRE capacity allocation
- Choosing the right programming language for automation (Python, Go)
- Building reliable scripts: Error handling, idempotency, logging
- Version controlling automation code
- Testing automation workflows before deployment
- Automating deployment rollbacks
- Self-healing infrastructures: Auto-restart, auto-scale, auto-repair
- Automating certificate renewals and configuration updates
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for reliability
- Using Terraform for consistent environment provisioning
- Automating security patching and CVE remediation
- Trigger-based automation: Event-driven workflows
- CI/CD pipelines with reliability gates
- Automated canary analysis and rollouts
- Reducing manual configurations through templates
- Automated consistency checks across environments
- Measuring toil reduction impact over time
- Documenting automated systems for team onboarding
Module 6: Release Engineering and Deployment Reliability - The SRE role in software releases
- Deployment strategies: Blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags
- Implementing progressive delivery
- Rollback strategies and rollback testing
- Health checks during deployments
- Built-in canary analysis with automated metrics validation
- Defining deployment windows and risk budgets
- Automating pre-deployment checklist validation
- Managing database migrations safely
- Zero-downtime deployment patterns
- Tracking deployment success rates over time
- Release approval workflows involving SRE
- Creating deployment dashboards with real-time status
- Integrating SLOs into release criteria
- Deployment throttling based on error budget consumption
- Feature flag management and kill switch implementation
- Managing configuration drift during releases
- Using dark launches for testing in production
- Release postmortems for failed or unstable deployments
- Continuous benchmarking of deployment performance
Module 7: Scalability and Capacity Planning - Understanding system scaling: Vertical vs horizontal
- Predicting load growth patterns
- Load testing strategies and tools (k6, Locust, JMeter)
- Designing for graceful degradation under load
- Backpressure mechanisms and rate limiting
- Auto-scaling configurations and thresholds
- Queue management and task prioritisation
- Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, partitioning
- Content delivery networks and edge caching
- Capacity planning based on business projections
- Resource forecasting models
- Benchmarking system performance at scale
- Identifying bottlenecks in distributed systems
- Cost-performance trade-offs in infrastructure scaling
- Right-sizing cloud instances for optimal TCO
- Managing cold starts in serverless environments
- Scaling stateful vs stateless services
- Designing for regional failover and disaster recovery
- Capacity dashboards and early warning systems
- Communicating capacity constraints to product teams
Module 8: Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing - Introduction to chaos engineering principles
- The steady-state hypothesis and expected behaviour
- Designing controlled experiments to test system resilience
- Tools for chaos engineering: Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus
- Implementing chaos experiments in staging environments
- Gradual rollout: Starting small, increasing blast radius
- Automating chaos injection as part of CI/CD
- Validating recovery mechanisms through failure tests
- Measuring recovery time objectives (RTO)
- Testing redundancy and failover mechanisms
- Network partition testing and latency injection
- CPU, memory, and disk stress testing
- Testing third-party service failure scenarios
- Scheduling chaos experiments without disrupting users
- Danger zones: When not to run chaos experiments
- Documenting findings and improving system design
- Building organisational trust in resilience testing
- Integrating chaos results into incident response plans
- Creating a resilience scorecard for services
- Certifying services as “chaos-ready”
Module 9: Distributed Systems Design for Reliability - Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- The limits of traditional monitoring vs modern observability
- Three pillars of observability: Logs, metrics, traces
- Designing high-cardinality event logging
- Structured logging: JSON, correlation IDs, metadata tagging
- Choosing log aggregation tools: ELK, Splunk, Loki
- Metrics collection: Push vs pull models, Prometheus best practices
- Defining key operational metrics: QPS, p95 latency, CPU, memory
- Instrumenting applications for observability
- Distributed tracing: Understanding request flows across services
- Implementing OpenTelemetry standards
- Building custom dashboards for team-level visibility
- Creating executive summary dashboards
- Detecting anomalies with statistical baselining
- Setting appropriate thresholds and alerting boundaries
- Reducing alert noise through intelligent grouping
- Using health checks and synthetic monitoring
- Monitoring for performance degradation trends
- Telemetry sampling strategies and cost control
- Ensuring secure transmission of telemetry data
- Regulatory compliance in log retention and access
Module 4: Incident Management and Response - Stages of incident lifecycle: Detection, response, resolution, review
- Designing an effective incident command structure
- Role-based responsibilities during outages
- Incident severity classification framework
- Escalation paths and communication trees
- Automated incident detection and notification workflows
- Creating runbooks for common failure scenarios
- Standardising incident response playbooks
- Using incident management platforms (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
- Effective communication during outages: Internal and external
- Drafting real-time status updates for stakeholders
- Minimising cognitive overload during high-pressure events
- Using war rooms and chat channels effectively
- Post-incident documentation: Timelines, decisions, actions
- Measuring incident duration and resolution effectiveness
- Conducting blameless postmortems
- Identifying root causes vs symptoms
- Writing actionable postmortem reports
- Prioritising follow-up actions and remediation items
- Tracking postmortem action items to closure
- Building organisational learning from failures
Module 5: Automation and Toil Reduction - Identifying toil: Repetitive, manual, automatable tasks
- Classifying tasks by automation feasibility
- The 50% automation rule: SRE capacity allocation
- Choosing the right programming language for automation (Python, Go)
- Building reliable scripts: Error handling, idempotency, logging
- Version controlling automation code
- Testing automation workflows before deployment
- Automating deployment rollbacks
- Self-healing infrastructures: Auto-restart, auto-scale, auto-repair
- Automating certificate renewals and configuration updates
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for reliability
- Using Terraform for consistent environment provisioning
- Automating security patching and CVE remediation
- Trigger-based automation: Event-driven workflows
- CI/CD pipelines with reliability gates
- Automated canary analysis and rollouts
- Reducing manual configurations through templates
- Automated consistency checks across environments
- Measuring toil reduction impact over time
- Documenting automated systems for team onboarding
Module 6: Release Engineering and Deployment Reliability - The SRE role in software releases
- Deployment strategies: Blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags
- Implementing progressive delivery
- Rollback strategies and rollback testing
- Health checks during deployments
- Built-in canary analysis with automated metrics validation
- Defining deployment windows and risk budgets
- Automating pre-deployment checklist validation
- Managing database migrations safely
- Zero-downtime deployment patterns
- Tracking deployment success rates over time
- Release approval workflows involving SRE
- Creating deployment dashboards with real-time status
- Integrating SLOs into release criteria
- Deployment throttling based on error budget consumption
- Feature flag management and kill switch implementation
- Managing configuration drift during releases
- Using dark launches for testing in production
- Release postmortems for failed or unstable deployments
- Continuous benchmarking of deployment performance
Module 7: Scalability and Capacity Planning - Understanding system scaling: Vertical vs horizontal
- Predicting load growth patterns
- Load testing strategies and tools (k6, Locust, JMeter)
- Designing for graceful degradation under load
- Backpressure mechanisms and rate limiting
- Auto-scaling configurations and thresholds
- Queue management and task prioritisation
- Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, partitioning
- Content delivery networks and edge caching
- Capacity planning based on business projections
- Resource forecasting models
- Benchmarking system performance at scale
- Identifying bottlenecks in distributed systems
- Cost-performance trade-offs in infrastructure scaling
- Right-sizing cloud instances for optimal TCO
- Managing cold starts in serverless environments
- Scaling stateful vs stateless services
- Designing for regional failover and disaster recovery
- Capacity dashboards and early warning systems
- Communicating capacity constraints to product teams
Module 8: Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing - Introduction to chaos engineering principles
- The steady-state hypothesis and expected behaviour
- Designing controlled experiments to test system resilience
- Tools for chaos engineering: Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus
- Implementing chaos experiments in staging environments
- Gradual rollout: Starting small, increasing blast radius
- Automating chaos injection as part of CI/CD
- Validating recovery mechanisms through failure tests
- Measuring recovery time objectives (RTO)
- Testing redundancy and failover mechanisms
- Network partition testing and latency injection
- CPU, memory, and disk stress testing
- Testing third-party service failure scenarios
- Scheduling chaos experiments without disrupting users
- Danger zones: When not to run chaos experiments
- Documenting findings and improving system design
- Building organisational trust in resilience testing
- Integrating chaos results into incident response plans
- Creating a resilience scorecard for services
- Certifying services as “chaos-ready”
Module 9: Distributed Systems Design for Reliability - Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Identifying toil: Repetitive, manual, automatable tasks
- Classifying tasks by automation feasibility
- The 50% automation rule: SRE capacity allocation
- Choosing the right programming language for automation (Python, Go)
- Building reliable scripts: Error handling, idempotency, logging
- Version controlling automation code
- Testing automation workflows before deployment
- Automating deployment rollbacks
- Self-healing infrastructures: Auto-restart, auto-scale, auto-repair
- Automating certificate renewals and configuration updates
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for reliability
- Using Terraform for consistent environment provisioning
- Automating security patching and CVE remediation
- Trigger-based automation: Event-driven workflows
- CI/CD pipelines with reliability gates
- Automated canary analysis and rollouts
- Reducing manual configurations through templates
- Automated consistency checks across environments
- Measuring toil reduction impact over time
- Documenting automated systems for team onboarding
Module 6: Release Engineering and Deployment Reliability - The SRE role in software releases
- Deployment strategies: Blue-green, canary, rolling, feature flags
- Implementing progressive delivery
- Rollback strategies and rollback testing
- Health checks during deployments
- Built-in canary analysis with automated metrics validation
- Defining deployment windows and risk budgets
- Automating pre-deployment checklist validation
- Managing database migrations safely
- Zero-downtime deployment patterns
- Tracking deployment success rates over time
- Release approval workflows involving SRE
- Creating deployment dashboards with real-time status
- Integrating SLOs into release criteria
- Deployment throttling based on error budget consumption
- Feature flag management and kill switch implementation
- Managing configuration drift during releases
- Using dark launches for testing in production
- Release postmortems for failed or unstable deployments
- Continuous benchmarking of deployment performance
Module 7: Scalability and Capacity Planning - Understanding system scaling: Vertical vs horizontal
- Predicting load growth patterns
- Load testing strategies and tools (k6, Locust, JMeter)
- Designing for graceful degradation under load
- Backpressure mechanisms and rate limiting
- Auto-scaling configurations and thresholds
- Queue management and task prioritisation
- Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, partitioning
- Content delivery networks and edge caching
- Capacity planning based on business projections
- Resource forecasting models
- Benchmarking system performance at scale
- Identifying bottlenecks in distributed systems
- Cost-performance trade-offs in infrastructure scaling
- Right-sizing cloud instances for optimal TCO
- Managing cold starts in serverless environments
- Scaling stateful vs stateless services
- Designing for regional failover and disaster recovery
- Capacity dashboards and early warning systems
- Communicating capacity constraints to product teams
Module 8: Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing - Introduction to chaos engineering principles
- The steady-state hypothesis and expected behaviour
- Designing controlled experiments to test system resilience
- Tools for chaos engineering: Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus
- Implementing chaos experiments in staging environments
- Gradual rollout: Starting small, increasing blast radius
- Automating chaos injection as part of CI/CD
- Validating recovery mechanisms through failure tests
- Measuring recovery time objectives (RTO)
- Testing redundancy and failover mechanisms
- Network partition testing and latency injection
- CPU, memory, and disk stress testing
- Testing third-party service failure scenarios
- Scheduling chaos experiments without disrupting users
- Danger zones: When not to run chaos experiments
- Documenting findings and improving system design
- Building organisational trust in resilience testing
- Integrating chaos results into incident response plans
- Creating a resilience scorecard for services
- Certifying services as “chaos-ready”
Module 9: Distributed Systems Design for Reliability - Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Understanding system scaling: Vertical vs horizontal
- Predicting load growth patterns
- Load testing strategies and tools (k6, Locust, JMeter)
- Designing for graceful degradation under load
- Backpressure mechanisms and rate limiting
- Auto-scaling configurations and thresholds
- Queue management and task prioritisation
- Database scaling: Read replicas, sharding, partitioning
- Content delivery networks and edge caching
- Capacity planning based on business projections
- Resource forecasting models
- Benchmarking system performance at scale
- Identifying bottlenecks in distributed systems
- Cost-performance trade-offs in infrastructure scaling
- Right-sizing cloud instances for optimal TCO
- Managing cold starts in serverless environments
- Scaling stateful vs stateless services
- Designing for regional failover and disaster recovery
- Capacity dashboards and early warning systems
- Communicating capacity constraints to product teams
Module 8: Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing - Introduction to chaos engineering principles
- The steady-state hypothesis and expected behaviour
- Designing controlled experiments to test system resilience
- Tools for chaos engineering: Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, Litmus
- Implementing chaos experiments in staging environments
- Gradual rollout: Starting small, increasing blast radius
- Automating chaos injection as part of CI/CD
- Validating recovery mechanisms through failure tests
- Measuring recovery time objectives (RTO)
- Testing redundancy and failover mechanisms
- Network partition testing and latency injection
- CPU, memory, and disk stress testing
- Testing third-party service failure scenarios
- Scheduling chaos experiments without disrupting users
- Danger zones: When not to run chaos experiments
- Documenting findings and improving system design
- Building organisational trust in resilience testing
- Integrating chaos results into incident response plans
- Creating a resilience scorecard for services
- Certifying services as “chaos-ready”
Module 9: Distributed Systems Design for Reliability - Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Challenges in distributed computing: Latency, consistency, faults
- Understanding the CAP theorem and its practical implications
- Designing for eventual consistency
- Idempotency in distributed operations
- Implementing retry strategies with exponential backoff
- Timeouts, circuit breakers, and bulkheads
- Service mesh integration for reliability (Istio, Linkerd)
- Managing distributed tracing across service boundaries
- Cross-service SLI alignment
- Dependency risk assessment and mitigation
- Designing for graceful degradation of dependent services
- Managing configuration drift in microservices
- Ensuring compatibility during service versioning
- Inter-service communication patterns: gRPC, REST, message queues
- Data consistency across distributed databases
- Transaction management in distributed environments
- Eventual consistency patterns: Saga, event sourcing
- Designing fault-tolerant message processing
- Rate limiting and quota enforcement across services
- Metadata propagation for observability across hops
Module 10: Security, Compliance, and Reliability - The intersection of security and reliability
- Secure coding practices for SRE tools
- Automating security scanning in reliability pipelines
- Managing secrets in automation scripts
- Principle of least privilege in SRE access controls
- Role-based access to operational systems
- Secure logging: Avoiding PII in logs
- Encryption of telemetry and configuration data
- Compliance requirements for financial and healthcare systems
- Automating audit trail generation
- Incident response coordination with security teams
- Managing outages caused by security incidents
- Reliability considerations in patch management
- Zero-day vulnerability response protocols
- Secure bootstrapping of new services
- Digital certificate lifecycle management
- Secure CI/CD pipeline configuration
- Penetration testing impacts on system availability
- Security review gates in deployment workflows
- Reliability benchmarks for encrypted communications
Module 11: Data and Storage Reliability - Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Designing durable data storage architectures
- Replication strategies: Synchronous vs asynchronous
- Multi-region data replication and consistency models
- Backup strategies: Incremental, differential, full
- Automated backup scheduling and verification
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
- Testing data recovery procedures regularly
- Point-in-time recovery mechanisms
- Database failover automation
- Validating data integrity after recovery
- Handling corrupted data blocks or storage nodes
- Detecting silent data corruption
- Checksums and data validation routines
- Storage capacity monitoring and threshold alerts
- Automated cleanup of stale data and logs
- Managing storage cost vs availability trade-offs
- Evaluating SSD, HDD, and cold storage options
- Object storage reliability: S3, GCS, Azure Blob
- File system choices for reliability: ext4, XFS, ZFS
- Data lifecycle management policies
Module 12: Performance Engineering and Latency Optimisation - Identifying performance bottlenecks systematically
- Profiling CPU, memory, I/O, and network usage
- Optimising application-level performance
- Database query optimisation and indexing strategies
- Caching patterns: Client-side, server-side, distributed caches
- Cache invalidation strategies
- Content delivery network (CDN) configuration
- Frontend performance: Asset bundling, lazy loading
- Load shedding under extreme traffic
- Prioritising critical workloads during congestion
- Latency budgeting across service calls
- Monitoring end-to-end request latency
- Setting performance SLOs for user-facing features
- Correlating performance with business metrics
- Using flame graphs and stack tracing
- Reducing garbage collection pauses
- Tuning JVM and runtime parameters
- Connection pooling and reuse strategies
- Pre-warming caches and connections
- Continuous performance regression testing
Module 13: Cloud-Native Reliability and Managed Services - Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Architecting for managed service reliability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Understanding provider SLAs and their limitations
- Designing for regional and zone failures
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud reliability strategies
- Using managed databases with high availability
- Evaluating serverless reliability: Function cold starts, timeouts
- Reliability patterns in Kubernetes (Pod disruption budgets, HPA)
- Designing resilient Helm charts
- Stateful workloads on Kubernetes: PVCs, operators
- Istio fault injection for testing resiliency
- Configuring liveness and readiness probes correctly
- Node auto-repair and cluster upgrades
- Cloud cost monitoring to prevent budget-induced outages
- Using service accounts securely in the cloud
- Tagging and resource organisation for incident response
- Auto-remediation scripts in cloud environments
- Guardrails and policy enforcement (e.g. AWS Config, Forseti)
- Disaster recovery runbooks for cloud environments
- Testing region failover procedures
- Managing reliance on third-party SaaS providers
Module 14: Organisational SRE Implementation and Adoption - Building an SRE team: Hiring, roles, structure
- Setting SRE team goals and KPIs
- Gaining executive buy-in for SRE transformation
- Developing a phased SRE rollout plan
- Piloting SRE on critical services first
- Training development teams on SRE practices
- Embedding SRE principles into onboarding
- Creating centre of excellence for reliability
- Measuring organisational reliability improvements
- Conducting SLO readiness assessments
- Reliability scorecards for engineering teams
- Integrating SRE metrics into leadership reports
- Linking reliability to customer satisfaction (CSAT, NPS)
- Creating a shared language of reliability across teams
- Managing resistance to change
- Recognising and rewarding reliability achievements
- Scaling SRE practices across large organisations
- Vendor and partner management from an SRE perspective
- External audits and compliance reporting
- Preparing for external reliability certifications
Module 15: Certification Preparation & Career Advancement - Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth
- Reviewing core SRE concepts and frameworks
- Practice exercises: Defining SLIs, calculating error budgets
- Case study analysis: Real-world incident scenarios
- Designing a reliability strategy for a scaled application
- Creating a service-level objective policy document
- Developing an incident response playbook
- Building a chaos engineering experiment proposal
- Automating a common operational task
- Generating a system health dashboard
- Conducting a postmortem simulation
- Presenting reliability metrics to executives
- Preparing your Certificate of Completion submission
- Reviewing assessment rubrics and scoring criteria
- Common certification pitfalls and how to avoid them
- Updating your CV with SRE competencies and certification
- Positioning your SRE skills in job interviews
- Networking with SRE professionals and communities
- Continuing education pathways after certification
- Joining industry groups and forums
- Leveraging The Art of Service credential for career growth