Your SRE Background and Experience Questions
Articulate your hands-on experience with systems administration, monitoring tools, automation scripts, and any incident response involvement. Be specific about technologies (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform) and concrete examples of what you've built or fixed.
EasyTechnical
76 practiced
Explain the differences between metrics, logs, and traces in an observability strategy. For each category give concrete examples using technologies you have used (for example: Prometheus for metrics, ELK/Fluentd for logs, Jaeger/Zipkin for traces), describe typical retention and query patterns, and explain when each is the optimal source to debug a problem.
HardSystem Design
82 practiced
Design a robust deployment and rollback strategy for a feature that requires coordinated changes across multiple services and database schema migrations. Detail patterns such as expand-contract migrations, feature flags, choreographed rollouts, and steps to safely rollback without corrupting data. Include tools and automation you'd use to enforce these patterns.
MediumTechnical
76 practiced
Write a Python script or pseudocode that queries the Prometheus HTTP API to calculate a service's error budget burn rate and automatically opens or annotates a Jira ticket when the burn rate exceeds a threshold. Outline components (Prometheus query, threshold logic, Jira API integration), authentication handling, idempotency to avoid duplicate tickets, and error handling.
MediumTechnical
64 practiced
A production service has a 99.95% monthly availability SLO. You detect rapid error-budget burn caused by a misbehaving external dependency. Explain your triage process and immediate mitigations (for example: circuit-breakers, rate-limiting, graceful degradation, caching, or failover) to avoid violating the SLO, and outline longer-term remediation and communication steps.
HardTechnical
62 practiced
Design an idempotent automation workflow to roll TLS certificates or credentials across a fleet of Kubernetes services using HashiCorp Vault and Kubernetes Jobs/Controllers. Describe how to coordinate rollouts, ensure idempotency and safe partial application, verification steps after rotation, failure handling, and how to avoid cascading restarts that could cause outages.
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