SREs must have software development experience, but their primary strengths are network engineering, troubleshooting, deployment, and configurations. Site Reliability Engineer combines software engineering with IT to create highly reliable systems. SREs are responsible for the reliability of the full stack, from the front-end, customer-facing applications to the back-end database and hardware infrastructure.
Hence for any SRE interview, it’s likely you’ll need to show how you would go about setting up a humane on-call experience. For example, a candidate should explain that on-call should focus more on people when setting up on-call rotations and alert rules instead of processes and tools. SREs write and deploy code to improve the resilience of applications and infrastructure. They are also in charge of enhancing visibility into system health to gain deeper insights and prepare teams for incident response and remediation. SREs are tasked with ideating and implementing methods to enhance and automate operational tasks, thus streamlining development and deployment processes.
Site reliability engineering skills
If a majority of their career was spent in reactive mode, they may not know how to be proactive. Although the ideal is for systems to always work as expected, it’s normal for SREs to be faced with an occasional production incident. In order to ensure that these do not disrupt a company’s IT operations, SREs must know how to identify the issue at hand and resolve it using their knowledge of existing systems and infrastructure. Automation is a key component of site reliability engineering, as SREs utilize it to develop code quickly and efficiently for systems.
She has written about a range of different topics on various technologies, which include, Splunk, Tensorflow, Selenium, and CEH. An SRE, on the other hand, is a general-purpose role whose goal is to manage reliability in any kind of environment. Almost all businesses use the cloud today, so it’s a big part of an SRE’s job to make sure the cloud is reliable. SREs will spend a great deal of time writing code and developing tools to facilitate engineers’ communication with infrastructure. A special kind of file system with unique access rights is a “/proc” file system.
Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions & Answers
In your quest to fortify your company’s digital infrastructure, you may be considering outsourcing cybersecurity operations. When asked to select between creating new attributes or paying down technological financial obligations, my initial method is to consider the metrics and see which activities will give the better ROI. This objective evaluation is simple to finish when the right metrics are readily available. However, my experience has taught me to examine this issue subjectively to determine which effort would undoubtedly generate the best outcomes, result in future growth, and keep the DevOps group engaged.
- You can also mention any open source contributions you’ve made using version control systems.
- DevOps is a set of practices designed to help promote collaboration between development and operations teams and streamline software deployments.
- Destination network address translation (DNAT) is a technique for transparently changing the destination IP address of an end route packet and performing the inverse function for any replies.
- An IP address may be required for a device to connect to The internet after installation.
- A service-level indication also called an SLI, is utilized to determine the level of service the support group offers to the client.
- Like any job interview, you need to explain your desire and passion for the SRE role as it is not one of the easiest roles and comes with a lot of responsibilities and pressure.
For example, a recent incident was reported where a specific API endpoint was taking an unusually long time to respond. With the monitoring system in place, I quickly identified the endpoint and used tracing data to identify where the request was bottlenecked. I then used log data to identify the root cause, which was a database query issue. Once the issue was identified, we were able to quickly make the necessary changes to improve response times.
What is SRE in Scrum?
I believe a docker container is a platform, or PaaS, that utilizes containers with virtualized operating systems, software program collections, and other documents to deliver off software program Answers. Still, I’m sure I can quickly discover this by accessing several familiar information sources I use in my job. Observability includes defining, accumulating, and examining the metrics an organization requires to evaluate and enhance its procedures. The key to this procedure is picking the correct dimensions to supply the information the business requires to analyze and maximize its processes. The secret to boosting a company’s systems observability entails selecting the proper metrics, producing systems to gather and examine the information, and utilizing the results to boost the processes. This calls for dedication from everybody within the organization to gather the info and use the outcomes.
The work involves incorporating aspects of software engineering and applying them to resolve infrastructure and operations problems while creating scalable and highly reliable software systems. Our sample questions do not form a complete set and we do not recommend that anyone use them without first looking at the hiring company and team needs. Modify the questions to help find someone who is a great fit for the role the team needs filled. The big thing is to see how the questions may fit well into your interview process. This article is specifically intended for engineering managers and leaders working with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams.
Typical SRE Interview Process
Many people are aware of Service Level Agreement (SLA), but few are aware of Service Level Objective (SLO). These are often legally defined with penalties for missing the target availability. The SLO is a critical element of SLA between the vendor and client agreed beforehand to measure the performance of service providers and is formed as a way of avoiding disputes. SLOs provide a quantitative means to define the level of service a customer can expect from a provider, such as availability, throughput, frequency, response time, or quality. SLA can be understood as a promise to customers for uptime and service availability, while SLO is the goal set to meet the SLA. An SRE is responsible for being an on-call efficiency and quality of life steward.
I attempt to balance the objective and subjective analysis to determine the ideal course of action. Overall, my experience with container orchestration has helped me develop a deep understanding of containerized applications, and the infrastructure necessary to run them effectively at https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sre-site-reliability-engineer/ scale. An error budget policy demonstrates how a business decides to trade off reliability work against other feature work when SLO indicates a service is not reliable enough. Yes, I have experience with Kubernetes in my previous role as a Site Reliability Engineer at XYZ Corporation.
The hiring manager is looking for the candidate’s thinking process and how organized they find problem sources. They also want to check how you can think out of the box in resolving queries. A Site Reliability Engineer applicant must practice as many coding problems related to the data structure, algorithm, and system design as possible.
The candidate may be asked to share anecdotal scenarios and actions on specific problems in vital areas such as servers, networks, or services. To answer this question, you should discuss any experience that you have with developing and implementing automation processes. This can include your previous roles, any projects you’ve worked on, or courses you’ve taken related to the topic. Be sure to provide specific examples of how you have used automation processes in order to improve reliability and efficiency. Additionally, explain any challenges you faced when developing and implementing these processes, and how you overcame them.