SRE

Question 1

What is an SRE?

Answer 1

Site Reliability Engineer

Their approach to operations uses software as the primary tool for managing systems or improving the system (automation).

Question 2

What is toil?

Answer 2

Toil is mundane and repetitive tasks that could be automated because it follows a strict pattern.

Question 3

3 good practices for managing toil

Answer 3

1) Allocating strategic time to reducing/automating toil.
2) Do a cost benefit analysis to determine if automating the toil is worth it.
3) Keep a toil reduction backlog.

Question 4

What are 3 responsibilities of an SRE?

Answer 4

1) Eliminating toil
2) Working to service levels
3) Managing failure

Question 5

What is SLA?

Answer 5

Service Level Agreement

It is the target time for a service that you enter into contract with someone that uses that service.

Question 6

What is SLO?

Answer 6

Service Level Objective

• target goal/objective for the uptime of a service
• service health is defined in terms of multiple SLOs
• service level is more user focused and based on user experience
• goals have to be actually achievable

Question 7

What is SLI?

Answer 7

Service Level Indicator

• ongoing measure of system to make sure that an SLO is met
• has to be measurable
• for example, the availability/success rate is determined by the equation: (all status code besides 500 that occur) / (number of requests made)

Question 8

What are 3 ways that SRE differ from the traditional dev/ops split?

Answer 8

1. SREs review nuances of production; Dev/ops review the entire life cycle.
2. SREs focus on standards and metrics; Dev/ops focus on team synthesis.
3. SREs focus on a product’s system; Dev/ops focus on the development and delivery.