20 Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

As a result of following these steps, the application will be easily portable, scalable, and more resilient. Moving to a container-based infrastructure will reduce infrastructure overhead and improve the speed of deployment. As an example of my work in this area, in my previous role as a Cloud SRE, I containerized a monolithic application for a financial services company using Kubernetes.

Because both needs can affect site reliability, performance and availability, SREs are naturally involved with project decision-making alongside business leaders and project managers. An SRE candidate will usually face an array of infrastructure and operations questions — and some of the basic ones will typically involve OSes and security. For example, an interviewer might ask what happens when the ps command is entered into a UNIX prompt. Candidates might need to explain how to secure a container image, or the difference between RAID 0 versus RAID 5 — and when to use one over another. Other basic questions involve the difference between a service-level agreement (SLA) and service-level indicator, or the differences between virtualization, containers and Kubernetes. Software developers spend a lot of time chasing bugs and putting out production fires.

Most Common Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions, Answers & Explanation Ranked

Error budget plan is an allowance built into a service level arrangement to represent downtime and failings that influence the systems’ uptime. This supplies the technical assistance company with a buffer to accommodate unintended yet expected interruptions. Site Reliability engineers prepare error budget plan plans that define the tradeoffs between the reliability of a project and the threats the organization is willing to take to conserve money or time.

As a company grows, its systems will require necessary upgrades to match the operational needs. SREs must know how to determine that an existing system can accept new features, using resources like service-level indicator (SLI) and service-level objective (SLO) to assess the system’s reliability. To ace that job interview, aspiring SREs should prepare to discuss everything from programming languages to network troubleshooting at varying levels of detail. In other cases, an interviewer might present a candidate with a list of monitoring alerts from a tool and ask them to rate the alerts in terms of priority or severity. Such questions gauge the candidate’s ability to prioritize and manage time appropriately.

Primary Roles and Responsibilities of an SRE

Traditionally, DevOps has been more about collaboration between developer and operations. It shows that you’ve done your research and want to learn more about the company and the job. TCP is able to connect two endpoints thanks to the three-way handshake process, in which one side uses a SYN packet to start the connection setup and the other side replies with an ACK packet. An secured connection is made once the corresponding SYN and ACK packets have been sent and received by both parties. Vertical scaling is the process of expanding a system’s size by adding more resources. On an one physical server, it typically means adding additional hardware or servers.

Additionally, since most networks only assign one IP address to each device, a system for dynamically allocating IP addresses must exist. A person who specializes in enhancing apps and services as they’re being utilized is known by the names “DevOps” and “Site Reliability Engineer.” Both seat, as well as donate, are procedures made use of to course information throughout the web. Snat, called Source Network Address Translation, enables web traffic from an exclusive network to access the Internet. The distinction is that snat is connected with outbound communications for the Internet. Nevertheless, typical Internet Resources require creating details dnat for every node they communicate with.

Can You Clarify Exactly How Service Degree Goals, Or Slos, Are Used In The Job Of A Site Integrity Engineer?

Experience with application performance management tools like Retrace, New Relic, and others would be really valuable. They should be well versed at application logging best practices and exception handling. For larger companies or companies who don’t use the cloud, I could see them using both DevOps and site reliability engineering. DevOps practices can help ensure IT helps rack, stack, configure, and deploy the servers and applications.

• Most of the time, it’s as simple as finding ways to improve the communication and visibility across different departments – helping people find the information they need when they need it.
• Strong candidates will demonstrate the flexible, pragmatic nature it takes to work in harmony to reach a goal.
• That knowledge is what makes them so valuable at also monitoring and supporting it as a site reliability engineer.
• If you roll your eyes when career discussions turn to people skills or the broad bucket of “soft” skills, the SRE field probably isn’t the best fit for you.
• The interviewer wants to know that you understand the process and have the experience to do it correctly.
• The right interview questions can help you assess a candidate’s hard skills, behavioral intelligence, and soft skills.

Finally, SREs are often involved with multiple IT teams, multiple project managers and varied development groups. Effective project execution depends on effective communication and collaboration among these different teams. SREs facilitate collaboration and help resolve potential conflicts between teams or silos. SRE interviews might touch on personnel management, conflict resolution and other HR issues. Candidates might be asked to explain how they would scale certain elements of IT infrastructure, such as a vital service. A candidate’s approach to this task can reveal a lot about their expertise and confidence as an SRE.

Can you discuss any experience you have with Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms?

A service-level indication also called an SLI, is utilized to determine the level of service the support group offers to the client. SLIs are used to measure conformity with the SLOs, which specifies precisely how well the team is satisfying the SLA. In addition, I implemented a container security policy that enforced best practices https://wizardsdev.com/en/vacancy/sre-site-reliability-engineer/ such as container signing and image verification. As a result, we saw a 50% reduction in security vulnerabilities and passed multiple security audits with flying colors. By clicking the button above, I agree to the ZipRecruiter Terms of Use and acknowledge I have read the Privacy Policy, and agree to receive email job alerts.

The application was divided into microservices and the deployment time reduced from 4 hours to 20 minutes. Using this approach, I have been able to significantly increase the reliability and performance of several cloud-based systems I have worked on in the past. For example, with one project, we were able to reduce the number of outages from an average of two per month to less than five per year. This resulted in increased customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and improved business outcomes overall. Although every system is different in the services provided, common SLIs are used pretty often. SLO can be a specific measurable characteristic of SLA like availability, throughput, frequency, response time, or quality.

Companies who want to pool their computing resources to keep them running round-the-clock without having to invest in extra hardware frequently employ it. Virtualization can also be utilized for testing, such as system performance testing or software development. In a previous role, I managed a Kubernetes cluster with over 200 containers, deployed across multiple environments including development, staging, and production.

If you have experience with containerization technologies such as Docker or Kubernetes, mention this and provide details of your experience. If you don’t have any direct experience, talk about related skills that you do have and how they might help you pick up the necessary knowledge quickly. You should also emphasize your ability to learn new technologies quickly and efficiently. Your answer should demonstrate your understanding of the various security measures you might take, such as implementing encryption or firewalls.