DevOps-SRE Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation v1.2 Questions and Answers

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Google’s SRE approach emphasizes a blameless postmortem culture as a core learning mechanism. After a major outage, SRE teams conduct structured analyses to understand the root causes, contributing factors, and systemic weaknesses. The SRE Book defines this culture explicitly: “Postmortems are written analyses following incidents, designed to capture what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent the issue from recurring.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Postmortem Culture). This learning-focused approach reduces blame, increases resilience, and improves future reliability.

Option C aligns exactly with this principle.

Option A (follow-up culture) is vague and not an SRE term.

Option B (major incident culture) refers to incident handling, not learning afterward.

Option D (problem culture) is unrelated to SRE’s structured post-incident learning.

Thus, C is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In the context of SRE tooling and automation, configuration management platforms like Puppet support large-scale infrastructure reliability by enabling consistency, repeatability, and automation. Puppet’s Discovery capability allows engineers to automatically locate, identify, classify, and group cloud nodes or infrastructure resources. Although not directly from Google’s SRE Book, Discovery aligns with SRE principles of reducing toil and enabling scalable automation. SRE emphasizes “automating away the manual work of locating and managing infrastructure at scale.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Eliminating Toil). Puppet Discovery does precisely this by automatically scanning environments, detecting nodes, and providing metadata to group or manage them.

Option A (Provisioning) refers to creating infrastructure, not identifying it.

Option B (Delivery) relates to CI/CD processes.

Option D (Insight) relates to analytics and reporting, not node identification.

Therefore, C. Discovery is correct as it directly represents the capability described.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The term “wisdom of production” refers to the insights gained from real systems running under actual production conditions. Only production environments exhibit real user behavior, real workloads, true performance characteristics, and authentic failure modes. This concept is rooted in the SRE philosophy that production is the ultimate source of truth for understanding system behavior.

From the SRE Workbook, Chapter “Monitoring”:

“Only production provides the full truth about how a system behaves under real workloads. Production is the ultimate source of wisdom about the system.”

This makes clear that wisdom gained from production is indispensable. Testing and staging environments cannot reproduce all real-world variables, usage patterns, and failure pathways.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A describes engineering approaches but does not define “wisdom of production.”

C is incorrect because staging environments do not provide production wisdom.

D relates to automation strategy, not production insights.

Thus, the accurate meaning of the term is B — The wisdom gained from something running in production.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE applies economic principles, including diminishing marginal returns, to reliability engineering. As per the SRE Book: “Improving reliability becomes more expensive as the target approaches 100%, moving from increasing returns, to diminishing returns, and eventually negative returns.” (SRE Book – SLO Economics). This framework helps explain why striving for 100% availability is impractical and cost-ineffective.

The three recognized stages are:

Increasing returns – early improvements are inexpensive and highly impactful

Diminishing returns – costs rise while benefits shrink

Negative returns – achieving additional “nines” may reduce value due to slowed innovation

“Possible returns” is not part of this model.

Thus, D is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The statement “Toil is not important work” is NOT an SRE principle. This is incorrect based on the official Google SRE documentation. In the Site Reliability Engineering Book, toil is treated as a critical concept, because identifying and reducing toil directly enables reliability improvements and more engineering-focused work. The SRE book emphasizes that toil must be taken seriously and systematically reduced, but never dismissed.

From the SRE Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:

“Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, with no enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”

The SRE book further emphasizes:

“SRE teams should measure toil, track it, and make constant efforts to reduce it.”

This demonstrates that toil is significant and should not be ignored. Therefore, any suggestion that “toil is not important work” contradicts the documentation.

The other answer choices are actual SRE principles:

Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”

Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”

Automate what is currently done manually — Automation is a central SRE philosophy to reduce toil.

Reduce the cost of failure — Error budgets and controlled risk-taking are core SRE concepts designed to reduce the cost of failure.

Thus, the only option that is NOT an SRE principle is C.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE and modern DevOps best practices require that build artifacts—such as binaries, container images, and deployment packages—be stored in a secure, versioned artifact repository. These repositories ensure integrity, traceability, immutability, and security of deployment packages.

While the SRE Book does not use the ITIL term DML, it emphasizes:

“All production binaries should be stored in a secure, versioned repository to ensure consistent, repeatable, and trustworthy deployments.”

— Site Reliability Engineering Book, section on Release Engineering

The SRE Workbook expands on this principle by emphasizing signed and verified artifacts:

“To ensure safe rollout, artifacts must be built once, stored securely, signed, versioned, and deployed from a controlled artifact repository.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A A CMS manages configuration, not deployment artifacts.

B Subversion is a source code repository, not an artifact repository.

C A DML is an ITIL concept, but SRE practice does not rely on it; instead, SRE uses modern artifact repositories (e.g., GCR, ACR, Artifactory).

Thus, the correct answer is D.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Automation is the primary method of reducing toil in SRE. The Google Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil,” states:

“Automation is the most effective tool for reducing toil. Any recurring, manual, automatable task should be automated to prevent it from consuming engineering time.”

Automated release systems directly eliminate toil by:

Removing manual deployment steps

Removing repeated, error-prone human processes

Increasing reliability and consistency

Freeing engineers for high-value project work

The SRE Workbook reinforces this:

“CI/CD pipelines and release automation remove significant operational toil by replacing manual processes with repeatable, reliable automation.”

Why the other answers are incorrect:

B AI is not required for toil reduction.

C Meeting travel is not an SRE toil concern.

D Incorrect; automation dramatically reduces long-term toil, even though initial setup requires effort.

Thus, A is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

High turnover in IT operations roles is often driven by a combination of factors, not just one. The Google SRE Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil,” outlines that excessive toil, unpredictable work, and overload contribute to burnout and churn:

“Excessive operational workload and interrupt-driven work lead to burnout and high attrition among engineering and operational staff.”

The SRE Workbook adds:

“Teams overwhelmed with toil struggle to innovate, automate, or develop new skills, creating frustration and increasing turnover.”

Each option listed represents a recognized driver of burnout in SRE and operations environments:

Overload and disruptive work patterns are known contributors to burnout.

Lack of time for skills development demotivates engineers and prevents career growth.

Backlog-driven cultures force teams into reactive rather than proactive work.

The combination of these factors matches common causes of attrition in operations teams. Therefore, all of the above is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Service Level Indicators (SLIs) provide the quantitative measurements needed to determine how much of the Service Level Objective (SLO) has been consumed. Since the error budget is defined as the allowable amount of unreliability, SLI data is the source of truth for calculating how much of that budget remains.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives”:

“SLIs provide the measurements used to determine compliance with SLOs. Error budgets are computed directly from the SLI measurements over the defined time window.”

The SRE Workbook further explains:

“Error budgets quantify the inverse of SLO performance. SLIs provide the raw data that allow teams to calculate how much of the budget has been consumed and how much remains.”

Thus, SLI data is the Only mechanism that determines remaining error budget.

Therefore, the statement is True.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

When a team exceeds its error budget, SRE practice requires applying error budget policies that restrict feature releases and shift focus toward reliability improvement. The idea is to prevent further degradation of user experience and ensure the service meets the agreed reliability targets.

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives,” states:

“If the service exceeds its error budget, all new feature launches or risky changes are halted until reliability returns to acceptable levels. Engineering work should be directed toward addressing the causes of the budget overrun.”

This aligns with option A, which describes a reliability-focused response during sprint planning. Limiting sprint planning to post-mortem action items and reliability improvements is a direct application of error budget policies.

Additional guidance from the SRE Workbook:

“Error budget burn should directly influence decision-making. When the budget is exhausted, the team must focus on remediation work rather than new features.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

B Reviewing the error budget’s realism can be done periodically, but it is not the immediate consequence of a breach.

C Extending the error budget invalidates its purpose and is discouraged.

D Ignoring the error budget contradicts the entire SRE model and Google’s official guidance.

Therefore, A is the only correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE emphasizes organizational alignment and collaboration, warning against siloed thinking. The SRE Book highlights: “Local optimizations at the expense of the broader system lead to inefficiency, misalignment, and reduced reliability.” When individuals or teams focus only on their own “parts” instead of shared goals (“the whole”), it results in decreased cross-team communication, isolation, operational friction, and reduced efficiency.

Option B captures this SRE-documented outcome: increased introversion (siloing) and decreased efficiency.

Option A and D describe positive outcomes that contradict SRE principles of collaboration.

Option C implies healthy sharing, which does not result from silo-first behavior.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In SRE incident management, Google defines several formal roles during a major incident, including Incident Commander (IC), Communications Lead, Operations/Responder, and Planning Specialist. According to the SRE Workbook: “The Planning Lead is responsible for maintaining the source-of-truth incident state document, tracking action items, and ensuring the IC has the current situation overview.” (SRE Workbook – Chapter: Incident Management). This document contains timelines, changes, decisions, diagnostics, and action items—all crucial for reducing cognitive load during high-stress situations.

Option C—Planning Specialist—is therefore correct.

Option A (Logistics Specialist) is not defined as a core SRE incident role.

Option B (Communications Lead) manages outward communication, not the live incident log.

Option D (Incident Commander) leads the incident but delegates documentation to the planning role.

Hence, option C is the only answer that aligns with SRE’s defined responsibilities.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE supports microservices architecture because it improves reliability by reducing blast radius, allowing independent deployments, and enabling scalable autonomous teams. The SRE Book notes: “Microservices enable teams to independently iterate and improve reliability without the constraints of large monolithic systems.” (SRE Book – Distributed Systems). One of the strongest reasons to adopt microservices is modernizing and refactoring large legacy monoliths, allowing them to be broken into independently deployable, maintainable components.

Option A is therefore the best justification.

Options B, C, and D may involve architectural choices, but they do not explain why microservices are the preferred architecture for reliability and scalability.

Thus, A is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

All the listed reasons correctly describe why observability becomes essential in modern, user-focused, dynamically scaling architectures.

The SRE Workbook and Google Observability guidance both emphasize that traditional monitoring is insufficient in environments where:

Services are distributed

Traffic is unpredictable

Customer experience is a priority

Cloud-native, containerized, or microservice architectures are used

Key excerpts:

From Google’s Observability guidance:

“Monitoring relies on known failure modes; observability enables teams to explore unknown-unknowns and understand complex, dynamic systems.”

From the SRE Workbook:

“As systems scale and architectures shift toward microservices or containers, component-level monitoring provides an incomplete picture. Observability enables teams to understand user impact and system behavior holistically.”

Thus:

A Observability is critical for containerized and dynamic environments.

B Component monitoring alone cannot show customer experience or end-to-end reliability.

C Observability helps teams diagnose issues that could not be predicted in advance ("unknown unknowns").

All statements are correct, making D the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A Production Readiness Review (PRR) is a core SRE practice ensuring that a service meets specific reliability, operational, monitoring, and alerting standards before SRE assumes responsibility. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Workbook states: “PRRs validate that a service is prepared for production and ready for SRE engagement, ensuring operational readiness, monitoring completeness, on-call preparation, and automation maturity.” The goal is not merely organizational handover but ensuring the service is fully prepared for reliable operation in production.

Option A fits this definition exactly: ensuring the service is ready for SRE support.

Option B focuses on development/testing readiness, not production readiness.

Option C references standards/frameworks not part of PRR’s purpose.

Option D is only a partial implication—transition of accountability happens after PRR readiness, not the main purpose of PRR.

Thus, A is the correct SRE-aligned answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SLIs must measure user experience, and sometimes server-side metrics alone do not show the full picture. Client-side data may reveal issues such as:

Slow networks

Browser rendering delays

Mobile device limitations

CDN performance issues

Last-mile latency

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Indicators,” states:

“Server-side metrics do not always fully capture the user experience. In many cases, client-side measurements are required to understand the actual reliability delivered to users.”

The SRE Workbook reinforces:

“Some SLIs require client instrumentation because user-visible performance problems may not be observable from backend systems alone.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

B SLA negotiation has nothing to do with SLI selection.

C Automation engineering is unrelated to client-side measurement needs.

D Achievability of SLOs does not determine whether client-side data is needed; accuracy of user-experience measurement does.

Thus, the correct answer is A.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Modern SRE-aligned organizations use small, cross-functional product teams capable of owning design, development, testing, and operational reliability. The SRE Book emphasizes: “Effective service ownership arises from small, autonomous teams with diverse skillsets and strong collaboration habits.” These teams share responsibility, encourage feedback, and maintain open communication to meet reliability goals.

Option A correctly identifies the two positive characteristics:

Small and collaborative

Cross-functional skillsets

Options 3 and 4 represent dysfunctional behaviors—SRE literature explicitly discourages responsibility silos and discouraging feedback, as these reduce reliability and slow incident learning.

Thus, A is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Simplicity is a core SRE design principle. Google states: “Small, frequent, automated changes reduce risk and improve system stability.” (SRE Book – Release Engineering). Automating continuous, small deployments creates a simple and repeatable pipeline that increases agility while maintaining reliability. This approach aligns with both DevOps and SRE practices: reducing deployment complexity, lowering blast radius, and supporting rapid iteration.

Option B best reflects this philosophy: automated, continuous small deployments provide simplicity, stability, and agility simultaneously.

Option A improves process clarity but does not directly affect agility.

Option C is beneficial but broader and not specific to simplicity.

Option D focuses on control rather than agility.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE strengthens DevOps by adding reliability engineering, SLOs, error budgets, and production-focused automation. One key improvement is that the CI/CD pipeline extends safely into production using automated, tested, reliable deployment mechanisms.

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, “Release Engineering” chapter states:

“SRE complements DevOps by creating safe pathways for automated production deployments through engineering practices such as canarying, automation, and release gates.”

The SRE Workbook adds:

“SRE helps mature DevOps pipelines so they can operate safely in production, enabling continuous delivery to reach all the way through deployment.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

B SRE makes CD more necessary, not redundant

C SRE does not replace DevOps engineers

D IaC does not require moving to the cloud

Thus, the correct answer is A.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE defines capacity planning as the discipline of ensuring that a system has enough resources to meet expected demand, both now and in the future. The SRE Book states: “Capacity planning ensures that services have sufficient resources available to meet reliability and performance targets, accounting for growth, trends, and forecasted usage.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Capacity Planning). This involves forecasting workloads, analyzing trends, and creating plans to scale infrastructure so that service-level objectives can continue to be met.

Option C correctly describes capacity planning as creating a resource management plan to meet demand.

Option A refers to capacity monitoring, not planning.

Option B reflects generic resource management or cloud provider operations, not SRE capacity planning.

Option D refers to determining maximum capacity, which is a measurement activity—not full planning.

Thus, C is the correct SRE-aligned answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Embracing failure—through practices such as blameless postmortems, chaos engineering, and proactive detection—enables organizations to improve their incident response performance. This directly improves:

MTTD (Mean Time to Detect)

MTTR (Mean Time to Recover)

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, chapter “Postmortem Culture,” states:

“By examining failures without blame and learning from them, organizations improve their ability to detect issues faster and recover more quickly.”

Similarly, in the SRE Workbook, section on incident response:

“Learning from incidents is essential to reducing time to detection and time to mitigation.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents) is influenced by architecture and testing, not directly by embracing failure.

B These are DORA metrics — important, but not primarily tied to failure-embracing practices.

C Too vague and not a standard SRE metric pair.

Thus, D is the correct answer.