SRE Essentials

This intensive three-day workshop is designed for engineers and technical professionals seeking to master Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles through immersive, hands-on learning. Each module blends concise theory with practical labs, ensuring participants gain real-world skills in reliability, automation, monitoring, and incident management. The event culminates in a comprehensive disaster recovery and postmortem exercise, simulating real incident response and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Each module is structured around practical labs that mirror real-world challenges. The final day’s disaster recovery and postmortem exercise brings together all skills learned, providing a safe environment to practice high-stakes incident management and continuous improvement.

By the end of this course, learners will be able to:

• Apply SRE principles to real-world systems and scenarios
• Automate operational tasks and implement effective monitoring
• Respond to incidents using industry-standard procedures
• Conduct blameless postmortems and drive reliability improvements
• Collaborate effectively in high-pressure, real-time situations

Participants should have:

• Basic understanding of Linux/Unix systems and networking
• Familiarity with scripting (e.g., Bash, Python) is beneficial
• Prior exposure to cloud platforms or DevOps practices is helpful but not required
• Willingness to collaborate and participate in practical group exercises

Target Audience

This course is designed for:

• DevOps engineers and platform engineers seeking to deepen their reliability and incident management skills
• System administrators and operations staff responsible for service uptime and automation
• Software engineers interested in building reliable, scalable systems and understanding operational best practices
• Technical leads and engineering managers who want to foster a culture of reliability and continuous improvement within their teams

1: Introduction to SRE and Reliability Engineering

• Overview of SRE philosophy and key concepts
• The role of SRE in modern IT organizations
• Practical Lab: Setting up your SRE environment and tools

2: Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Error Budgets

• Defining and measuring SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs
• Error budgets and their impact on release velocity
• Practical Lab: Creating and tracking SLOs for a sample service

3: Monitoring, Alerting, and Observability

• Principles of effective monitoring and alerting
• Building observability into systems
• Practical Lab: Implementing monitoring dashboards and alert rules

4: Automation and Toil Reduction

• Identifying and eliminating toil through automation
• Tools and techniques for automating operational tasks
• Practical Lab: Writing scripts to automate common SRE workflows

5: Change Management and Release Engineering

• Safe deployment strategies and change management processes
• Balancing reliability with innovation
• Practical Lab: Simulating blue/green and canary deployments

6: Incident Response Principles

• Coordinated, well-drilled, and sustainable incident response
• Roles, responsibilities, and communication during incidents
• Practical Lab: Simulated incident response exercise

7: Incident Management Lab and Postmortem

• Applying SRE incident response principles in a simulated scenario
• Conducting a blameless postmortem to extract actionable lessons
• Highly Practical Lab: Full-scale incident simulation, including:

• Raising and managing an incident
• Real-time remediation activities
• Stakeholder communication and documentation
• Culminating Exercise: Disaster recovery and postmortem analysis, producing actionable outputs and improvement items

Exams and Assessments

There is no specific certification associated with this course.

Hands-On Learning

• Practical Lab: Setting up your SRE environment and tools
• Practical Lab: Creating and tracking SLOs for a sample service
• Practical Lab: Implementing monitoring dashboards and alert rules
• Practical Lab: Writing scripts to automate common SRE workflows
• Practical Lab: Simulating blue/green and canary deployments
• Practical Lab: Simulated incident response exercise
• Final incident management and disaster recovery simulation