Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a crucial role in modern IT and DevOps teams. SREs ensure systems are scalable, reliable, and efficient by automating operations, managing incidents, and optimizing performance.

If you’re preparing for an SRE interview, this guide will help you understand key topics, must-know concepts, and commonly asked interview questions.

1. Understanding the SRE Role

An SRE is responsible for:
✅ Ensuring system reliability and uptime
✅ Automating repetitive operational tasks
✅ Monitoring performance and resolving incidents
✅ Managing deployments and scaling infrastructure
✅ Optimizing costs and efficiency

Key Skills Required for an SRE

🔹 Linux and system administration
🔹 Cloud computing (AWS, GCP, Azure)
🔹 Kubernetes and containerization
🔹 CI/CD pipelines and automation
🔹 Monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
🔹 Scripting (Python, Bash, Go)
🔹 Networking and security

2. SRE Interview Topics and Preparation Guide

A. SRE Fundamentals

1️⃣ What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
SRE applies software engineering to IT operations to ensure reliable and scalable systems.

2️⃣ SLA, SLO, SLI - What’s the Difference?

1. SLA (Service Level Agreement): A contract defining performance guarantees.

2. SLO (Service Level Objective): The target reliability goal (e.g., 99.9% uptime).

3. SLI (Service Level Indicator): Measurable metrics like latency, error rates, and availability.

3️⃣ Error Budgets

1. The maximum allowable downtime before breaking an SLO.

2. Helps balance reliability and innovation by defining acceptable failure rates.

B. Incident Management & Monitoring

🔴 Incident Response:

1. How to handle outages and system failures.

2. Tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps.

📊 Monitoring & Logging:

1. Using Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, ELK Stack.

2. Setting up alerts and dashboards.

⚙️ Root Cause Analysis & Postmortems:

1. Writing blameless postmortems to improve future reliability.

C. Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

⚡ Configuration Management: Terraform, Ansible, Puppet
⚡ CI/CD Pipelines: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
⚡ Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes

💡 SRE interview tip: Learn Terraform and Kubernetes as they are commonly tested topics.

D. High Availability & Scaling

🚀 Load Balancing Strategies: Round-robin, Least Connections, IP Hash
🚀 Database Scaling: Read Replicas, Sharding, Caching
🚀 Zero-Downtime Deployments: Blue-Green Deployments, Canary Releases

💡 Common Question: "How would you design a scalable and highly available web service?"

Read More: SRE Interview Questions