Site Reliability Engineering Course

Lesson 1 • SRE Team Structure and Roles

Examines how SRE teams are organised, staffed, and embedded within organisations. Clarifies role boundaries with development and platform teams.

Lesson 2 • Key SRE Concepts and Terminology

Defines SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, and toil. Shared vocabulary enables precise communication across engineering and business teams.

Lesson 3 • Reliability Culture and Incentives

Explores psychological safety, blameless culture, and incentive alignment. Cultural foundations determine whether technical practices succeed or fail.

Lesson 1 • Error Budget Policy and Management

Defines how error budgets are calculated, tracked, and enforced. Error budgets translate abstract reliability goals into actionable engineering decisions.

Lesson 2 • Setting Realistic SLO Targets

Covers negotiation, baselining, and iterative refinement of SLO values. Targets must balance user expectations with engineering feasibility.

Lesson 3 • Choosing Meaningful SLIs

Guides selection of metrics that accurately reflect user experience. Poor SLI choice undermines the entire reliability measurement system.

Lesson 1 • On-Call Management and Runbooks

Structures on-call rotations, escalation paths, and runbook creation. Effective on-call practices reduce mean time to resolution and engineer burnout.

Lesson 2 • Observability Pillars: Metrics, Logs, Traces

Introduces the three observability pillars and their complementary roles. Understanding each pillar prevents over-reliance on any single data source.

Lesson 3 • Monitoring System Architecture

Examines scalable monitoring architectures including push vs. pull models and long-term storage. Architecture choices affect cost, reliability, and query performance.

Lesson 4 • Instrumentation and Data Collection

Covers code-level and infrastructure-level instrumentation techniques. Proper instrumentation is the prerequisite for meaningful observability.

Lesson 1 • Diagnosis and Mitigation Techniques

Teaches systematic diagnosis using observability data and hypothesis-driven debugging. Fast mitigation limits user impact whilst root cause analysis continues.

Lesson 2 • Incident Command and Coordination

Covers incident commander, communications lead, and scribe roles. Clear role assignment prevents confusion and speeds resolution during high-stress events.

Lesson 3 • Blameless Postmortems

Guides writing and facilitating blameless postmortems that produce actionable improvements. Postmortems are the primary mechanism for organisational learning.

Lesson 4 • Incident Classification and Severity

Defines severity levels, impact criteria, and triage procedures. Consistent classification ensures proportional response and resource allocation.

Lesson 1 • Automation Design Principles

Covers idempotency, safety, and observability requirements for operational automation. Poorly designed automation creates new failure modes worse than the toil it replaces.

Lesson 2 • Measuring Automation Effectiveness

Tracks toil reduction, automation coverage, and failure rates of automated systems. Measurement validates automation investment and surfaces regressions.

Lesson 3 • Automating Operational Workflows

Applies automation to common SRE tasks such as deployments, scaling, and remediation. Workflow automation frees engineers for higher-value reliability work.

Lesson 4 • Infrastructure as Code Fundamentals

Introduces declarative infrastructure provisioning and configuration management. IaC is the foundation for reproducible, auditable infrastructure automation.

Lesson 1 • Feature Flags and Dark Launches

Covers feature flag architecture, targeting rules, and operational hygiene. Flags decouple deployment from release, enabling safer experimentation.

Lesson 2 • Release Engineering Principles

Establishes reproducibility, hermetic builds, and policy-as-code for releases. Sound release engineering prevents configuration drift and supply chain issues.

Lesson 3 • Continuous Integration and Delivery

Covers CI pipeline design, test gates, and deployment frequency optimisation. High deployment frequency with quality gates reduces batch size and blast radius.

Lesson 4 • Rollback and Rollforward Strategies

Defines criteria and mechanisms for fast rollback and rollforward decisions. Reliable rollback capability is the safety net for all deployment strategies.

Lesson 1 • Capacity Modelling Techniques

Introduces resource utilisation models, queuing theory basics, and headroom targets. Models translate demand forecasts into concrete provisioning decisions.

Lesson 2 • Load Testing and Benchmarking

Teaches load test design, execution, and result interpretation for capacity validation. Load tests reveal bottlenecks before production traffic exposes them.

Lesson 3 • Demand Forecasting and Load Modelling

Covers traffic pattern analysis, seasonality modelling, and growth projection. Accurate demand forecasts prevent both under-provisioning and over-spending.

Lesson 4 • Auto-Scaling and Elastic Infrastructure

Designs horizontal and vertical auto-scaling policies tied to SLO-relevant signals. Elastic infrastructure absorbs demand spikes whilst controlling cost.

Lesson 1 • Chaos Engineering Fundamentals

Introduces chaos engineering principles, hypothesis design, and blast radius control. Controlled failure injection reveals hidden weaknesses before real incidents do.

Lesson 2 • Redundancy and Failover Architecture

Examines active-active, active-passive, and multi-region redundancy models. Redundancy architecture determines recovery time and data loss objectives.

Lesson 3 • Resilience Design Patterns

Covers circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries, and timeouts as core resilience primitives. Patterns prevent cascading failures and limit blast radius.

Lesson 4 • Dependency and Risk Management

Maps external dependencies, assesses failure probability, and designs mitigation controls. Dependency risk is a leading cause of reliability incidents.