Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Understand the discipline, its origins, and how SRE differs from and relates to DevOps and traditional ops.

The OS is the substrate of everything SRE. Master processes, memory, I/O, and the kernel boundary.

Distributed systems are networked systems. Know the stack from cables to TLS to load balancers.

SREs write software. Build solid coding skills plus the scripting that automates operations away.

The mental models behind why large systems fail in surprising ways.

Modern SRE runs on the cloud. Know the core service categories and at least one provider deeply.

Packaging and isolating workloads — the foundation under orchestration.

The dominant orchestration platform. Operating it well is central to most SRE roles.

Declarative, version-controlled infrastructure is non-negotiable at scale.

Safe, fast, repeatable delivery is how reliability ships to production.

You cannot operate what you cannot see. The instrumentation core of SRE.

The quantitative heart of SRE: defining, measuring, and budgeting reliability.

When things break, this is the SRE's defining moment. Respond, mitigate, and learn.

Ensuring systems have the headroom to serve load — and finding bottlenecks when they don't.

Designing systems that degrade gracefully and proving it deliberately.

Stateful services are the hardest to operate reliably — and where outages hurt most.

Reliability includes security. SREs own the operational side of keeping systems safe.

Advanced infrastructure SREs increasingly build internal platforms and run meshes.

Where SRE is heading: heavy automation, ML-assisted ops, and running AI systems.

Landing and thriving in an SRE role takes more than technical depth.