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

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:

SRE defines toil as “manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical work tied to running a service” (SRE Book – Eliminating Toil). Repetitive outages are specifically noted as a form of operational toil. The SRE Book and SRE Workbook emphasize adopting automation, intelligent tooling, and machine-learning–assisted systems to reduce toil and decrease Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS). The books state: “Reducing MTTR directly increases system reliability more effectively than attempting to eliminate all failures.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Managing Incidents).

AI and advanced automation help detect issues faster, classify patterns, trigger automated remediation, and reduce human intervention—delivering reliability gains through faster repair rather than perfect uptime.

Option A is the only option aligned with SRE’s reliability philosophy.

Options B and C incorrectly suggest increasing MTTR/MTRS.

Option D refers to “perfect MTRS,” which is impossible and contradicts SRE’s acceptance of failure.

Thus, A is correct.

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:

The Westrum Organizational Culture Model categorizes organizations based on how effectively they allow information to flow, particularly in high-risk and high-performance environments. This model is widely referenced in SRE and DevOps practices and is cited by Google in their SRE culture guidance.

The Westrum model identifies three culture types:

Pathological (power-oriented)

Bureaucratic (rule-oriented)

Generative (performance-oriented)

From the SRE Workbook and Google’s DevOps Research (DORA):

“The Westrum model is a taxonomy of organizational cultures based on how information flows. Generative cultures—with high cooperation and open information flow—correlate with higher reliability and better outcomes.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Deployment frequency is a DORA metric, not Westrum’s focus.

C Resource flow is unrelated to Westrum.

D While communication affects design, Westrum specifically studies information flow as a cultural health indicator, not structural design.

Thus, the correct answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In SRE practice, “full-service ownership” means the same team is responsible for the service across its entire lifecycle: design, development, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement. Google’s Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems describes SRE as a software-engineering-focused approach to operations, where engineers are responsible not only for writing the code but also for running it in production and improving its reliability over time. This aligns with the “you build it, you run it” model, which removes the traditional wall between development and operations and makes one team accountable for the whole service.

Option D — “The team is accountable for coding, shipping, and improving the application” — best matches this concept because it explicitly includes building (coding), releasing (shipping), and iterating (improving). Options A and B do not clearly include operational responsibility, and option C narrows the focus only to performance and reliability, omitting ownership of development and releases. Therefore, D most accurately reflects full-service ownership as described in SRE literature.

References (conceptual alignment):

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, Betsy Beyer et al., O’Reilly, particularly:

Introduction & “What Is Site Reliability Engineering?”

“Introduction to SRE at Google” and discussions of dev/ops ownership boundaries.

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:

One of SRE’s strengths is using software engineering and automation to reduce manual, process-heavy work. This aligns perfectly with ITSM goals around repeatability, compliance, and quality.

The SRE Workbook, section “SRE and ITIL Integration,” explains:

“SRE can complement ITSM by applying automation and engineering practices to reduce manual process load, increase consistency, and meet compliance requirements.”

Examples include:

Automating change processes

Automating incident response flows

Improving configuration consistency

Reducing ticket-driven toil through engineering

Why the other options are incorrect:

A CAB approvals are not governed by error budgets

C Ticket acceleration is not the goal of SRE

D Engineering CMDBs is not the primary mechanism for ITSM alignment

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Google defines SRE as “what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function.” (SRE Book – Introduction). The core engineering approach in SRE focuses on:

Eliminating toil

Building scalable systems

Applying software engineering to operational challenges

Learning from previous solutions and patterns

The SRE Book emphasizes: “SREs focus on designing and engineering solutions that reduce manual operations and scale service delivery.” (Chapter: Eliminating Toil). This aligns directly with Option B: designing a solution to eliminate toil and scale service delivery, informed by prior successful engineering patterns.

Option A focuses only on automating a single tuning activity—not holistic engineering.

Option C describes deployment, not engineering approach to operations.

Option D is about incident response, not engineering strategy.

Thus, B is the best representation of SRE’s engineering approach.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Defense-in-Depth (DiD) is a layered security strategy referenced in SRE’s discussions of secure infrastructure and resilience. The perimeter layer is responsible for controlling and monitoring traffic flowing into and out of the network from external sources, such as the public Internet. This includes firewalls, intrusion detection systems, load balancers, and boundary network controls.

While SRE focuses primarily on reliability, the SRE Book stresses the importance of resilient system boundaries: “Perimeter protections are critical where external traffic enters the system.” (SRE Book – Security and Infrastructure considerations).

Option C correctly identifies the Perimeter Layer as the network boundary where data flows in/out from other networks—including the Internet.

Option A (Host layer) secures individual machines.

Option B (Physical layer) refers to hardware, power, racks, etc.

Option D (Data layer) protects stored data, not ingress/egress traffic.

Thus, C is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A Network Reliability Engineer (NRE) is a specialized reliability role focused on applying SRE practices to networking. They use software engineering, SDLC concepts, and automation to manage networks at scale, including SDNs.

Google describes NRE as:

“Network Reliability Engineering applies SRE principles to network management, treating network configuration as code and automating changes safely.”

— Google Reliability Engineering Guidance

Responsibilities include:

Codifying SDN configurations

Automating network deployment

Testing network changes through CI/CD

Reducing network-related outages

Thus, the correct answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE and DevOps share a common view of continuous monitoring—a holistic approach that enables rapid detection, diagnosis, and response across all parts of the system. The SRE Book states: “Monitoring must enable fast detection of anomalies, quick diagnosis, and effective incident response.” Continuous monitoring includes application metrics, infrastructure signals, logs, traces, service health, and user-experience telemetry.

Option B captures this accurately: a combination of tools and processes enabling rapid incident detection and response, especially for cloud services.

Option A is partially correct but too narrow (only end-user transactions).

Option C is generic and does not emphasize continuous or rapid detection.

Option D describes infrastructure monitoring only—not full DevOps/SRE continuous monitoring.

Thus, B is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Kubernetes is described in SRE-aligned literature as an open-source container orchestration platform that automates deployment, scaling, failover, and lifecycle management of containerized applications. The Site Reliability Workbook references Kubernetes as: “a container management system that automatically handles service discovery, scaling, rollout management, and self-healing.” (SRE Workbook – Production Environment chapters). Kubernetes does not replace an OS, nor is it a CI/CD platform; it sits on top of an OS and orchestrates containers across clusters.

Option C is the most accurate: it captures container management, cloud deployment context, automated scaling, and failover—key capabilities of Kubernetes.

Options A and B incorrectly describe CI/CD platforms.

Option D incorrectly labels Kubernetes as an “operating system.”

Thus, C is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

“Toil” in SRE has a very specific meaning. According to the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:

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

The key phrase is “no enduring value.” Toil does not produce lasting improvement, even though it may be necessary in the short term. It consumes engineering effort without making the system better over time.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B Work that has some enduring value cannot be classified as toil by definition.

C Engineering work that adds service features is explicitly non-toil, because SRE defines feature work as “project work,” not operational toil.

D Seems close but is misleading: engineering work without enduring value is poor engineering, not necessarily toil. Toil refers to operations workload specifically.

Thus, A is the correct and precise definition of toil.

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:

The SRE Book defines the Four Golden Signals of monitoring as Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation. Specifically, it describes “Errors” as: “the rate of requests that fail, whether explicitly, implicitly, or by policy.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Monitoring Distributed Systems). This includes HTTP 5xx responses, timeouts, and requests served but not meeting success criteria.

This definition matches option B exactly.

Option A describes latency, not errors.

Option C describes traffic.

Option D describes saturation (resource usage).

Therefore, B is the correct and SRE-accurate description of the golden signal for errors.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In a safety culture, SRE emphasizes psychological safety so engineers can work effectively in production without fear of blame. However, safety never removes accountability. Engineers must take responsibility for their actions, decisions, and assumptions, particularly during incidents.

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

“Blamelessness does not eliminate accountability. Individuals must still explain the context, assumptions, and reasoning behind their decisions so that the organization can learn.”

Google stresses that:

Engineers must feel safe to act and report issues

Engineers must remain responsible and accountable

Accountability enables learning, not punishment

Why other options are incorrect:

A Sharing incidents on social media violates confidentiality

C Blameless postmortems are required, not skipped

D Avoiding on-call is contrary to SRE responsibilities

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Google’s SRE definition is explicit: “Site Reliability Engineering is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.” (SRE Book – Introduction). This clearly defines SRE as a software engineering approach applied to operational problems. The goal is to use software techniques—automation, coding, testing, version control, CI/CD, observability—to improve reliability and reduce toil. The book emphasizes: “SRE applies software engineering to operations work.” (SRE Book – What Is SRE?).

Option C is the only answer fully aligned with the official definition.

Options A, B, and D do not correspond to the SRE definition provided by Google.

Thus, the correct missing phrase is software engineering.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are directly tied to user experience, and this connection is central to the SRE philosophy. The purpose of an SLO is to define how well a service must perform to keep users satisfied, without exceeding what is necessary or economically practical.

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

“The most important directive when defining SLOs is that they must reflect the expectations and needs of the users of the service.”

Similarly, the SRE Workbook, Chapter “Implementing SLOs,” highlights:

“SLOs are a tool to measure and control the reliability as experienced by the user.”

This makes it clear that SLOs are fundamentally user-centric. They are not based on internal engineering preferences, management goals, or operational convenience.

Why the other options are incorrect:

B. Management approval — SLOs are not driven by management goals but by user needs.

C. Change success rate — While related to reliability practices, change success is not the basis of SLO creation.

D. Toil reduction — Toil is unrelated to defining service-level targets.

Therefore, the correct answer is A.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Swarming is described in modern SRE incident management as a collaborative, multi-expert response model. Instead of linear escalation, SRE uses: “a rapid collaboration of the right experts at the same time to resolve incidents quickly.” (SRE Workbook – Effective Incident Response). Swarming pulls specialists together immediately, allowing them to jointly triage and work on issues, improving time-to-resolution and reducing handoff delays.

Option D captures this: multiple specialist teams coming together simultaneously to determine ownership and action.

Option A describes traditional tiered escalation, which SRE avoids.

Option B represents a reactive queue model, not swarming.

Option C focuses on monitoring progress, not active collaborative response.

Thus, D 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:

An error budget accounts for all downtime, including both planned and unplanned outages. This is a critical SRE principle: the user does not distinguish between maintenance downtime and accidental downtime — therefore, neither should the SLO nor the error budget.

The SRE Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives,” states:

“From the user’s perspective, availability is simply whether the service is working or not, regardless of whether the outage was planned or unplanned.”

This means all downtime counts toward the error budget.

Additionally, the SRE Workbook reinforces this point:

“Error budgets must include every form of unavailability — maintenance events, configuration changes, emergency work, and unexpected incidents.”

This confirms that planned outages (maintenance windows) and unplanned outages (incidents) both consume error budget.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Only includes unplanned incidents; SRE requires counting planned outages as well.

B Defect fixes may contribute to downtime, but “defect fixes” alone are not a downtime category.

D CAB approval has no bearing on whether outages count toward error budgets.

Thus, C is correct: any planned or unplanned outage must be included.