Top 50 SRE Interview Questions with Answers

SRE Interview Questions with Answers

1. What is SRE?

A. Site Reliability Engineering
B. System Requirements Engineering
C. Software Risk Evaluation

Answer: A

2. What initiatives have you driven as an SRE?

Answer: The answer to this question would depend on your experience as an SRE, but you should highlight any initiatives you’ve driven to improve system reliability or enhance the customer user experience.

3. What is the difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA?

A. There is no difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA.
B. SLI measures service level objectives, SLO measures service level agreements, and SLA measures service level indicators.
C. SLI measures service level indicators, SLO measures service level objectives, and SLA measures service level agreements.

Answer: C

4. What is “error budget” in SRE?

A. It is a quantitative measure of how many errors can occur before breaking the SLO.
B. It is the total number of errors that occur in a system over a given period.
C. It is a report that details every error encountered in production.

Answer: A

5. How do you manage escalations when an incident occurs?

Answer: You should describe the process of incident escalation and handling, which includes defining roles, identifying the source of the incident, troubleshooting, communication, and post-mortem analysis.

6. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring system reliability?

Answer: Depending on the organization, KPIs may vary, but common KPIs for measuring system reliability are uptime, mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to resolve (MTTR), and error rates.

7. What is the role of automation in SRE?

Answer: Automation plays a critical role in SRE as it enables a consistent, efficient, and error-free way of managing systems and infrastructure, reducing manual intervention, and improving system reliability.

8. What is the difference between proactive and reactive measures?

A. There is no difference between proactive and reactive measures.
B. Proactive measures prevent incidents from occurring, while reactive measures address incidents after they have occurred.
C. Proactive and reactive measures have the same impact on system reliability.

Answer: B

9. What is “evil testing” in SRE?

A. It is a form of testing that intentionally causes failures or errors in a system to test its recovery mechanisms.
B. It is a testing process that only tests the optimal scenarios for a system.
C. It is a testing process done to identify vulnerabilities in a system.

Answer: A

10. What do you know about “chaos engineering”?

Answer: Chaos engineering is a technique that involves deliberately introducing faults or failures in a system to test its resilience and recovery mechanisms, with the goal of increasing system reliability.

11. How would you handle a failed deployment?

Answer: You should describe the process of identifying the cause of a failed deployment, involving relevant stakeholders and communication, troubleshooting, and addressing and documenting the post-mortem analysis.

12. What is the role of monitoring in SRE?

Answer: Monitoring is a crucial aspect of SRE that involves collecting and analyzing data to detect and diagnose system issues, ensuring that performance meets defined SLAs and SLOs.

13. What is your experience with cloud technologies?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise in cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, including cloud architecture, security, scalability, and reliability.

14. What is your experience with automation tools?

Answer: You should describe your experience working with automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet, including infrastructure as code, configuration management, and version control.

15. How do you handle conflicting priorities?

Answer: You should describe your approach to prioritization, including stakeholder management, goal alignment, and communication, and how you escalate and resolve any conflicts that arise.

16. What is the “five whys” approach?

A. It is a problem-solving technique that involves identifying the root cause of an issue by asking a series of “why” questions.
B. It is a technique to identify five potential solutions to a problem.
C. It is a technique to ask five open-ended questions to identify what customers want.

Answer: A

17. What is your experience with microservices?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise in microservices architecture, monitoring, deployment, and management.

18. What is your experience with distributed systems?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise in distributed systems architecture, reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

19. What is the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling?

A. There is no difference between horizontal and vertical scaling.
B. Horizontal scaling adds more resources to existing nodes, while vertical scaling adds more nodes to an existing system.
C. Vertical scaling adds more resources to existing nodes, while horizontal scaling adds more nodes to an existing system.

Answer: C

20. What is the “blast radius” in SRE?

A. It is the area around a system affected by an incident.
B. It is the extent to which an incident affects system availability or performance.
C. It is a quantitative measure of the severity of an incident.

Answer: A

21. What is your experience with DevOps?

Answer: You should describe your experience with DevOps practices such as continuous integration and delivery, building and deploying applications, and collaborating across teams.

22. How do you handle security incidents?

Answer: Depending on the organization, you should describe your experience with security management, incident response, and mitigation.

23. What is your experience with containers?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with containerization technologies such as Docker or Kubernetes, including containerization best practices, management, and deployment.

24. What is the role of communication in SRE?

Answer: Communication is a critical aspect of SRE that involves collaborating with cross-functional teams, managing stakeholders, and ensuring effective incident response and post-mortem analysis.

25. What is your experience with load balancing?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with load balancing technologies such as NGINX, HAProxy, or F5, including performance optimization, monitoring, and failover mechanisms.

26. What is the role of change management in SRE?

Answer: Change management is a crucial aspect of SRE that involves managing and tracking changes to production systems, ensuring that changes are reviewed, tested, and deployed safely and reliably.

27. How do you handle system outages?

Answer: You should describe your experience with incident management, including identifying the cause of the outage, troubleshooting, communication, post-mortem analysis, and ensuring system recovery.

28. What is the “blameless post-mortem” approach?

A. It is a technique to identify who is responsible for an incident.
B. It is a technique to learn from incidents without blaming individuals or teams for the incident.
C. It is a technique to prevent incidents from occurring in the future.

Answer: B

29. What is your experience with database management?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with database management technologies such as MySQL, Oracle, or MongoDB, including scaling, sharding, and backup/recovery mechanisms.

30. What is your experience with infrastructure as code (IaC)?

Answer: You should describe your experience with IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation or Ansible, including infrastructure provisioning, management, and deployment.

31. What is the difference between fault tolerance and high availability?

A. There is no difference between fault tolerance and high availability.
B. High availability refers to the ability of a system to continue functioning despite hardware or software failures, while fault tolerance refers to the ability of a system to tolerate or recover from these failures.
C. High availability and fault tolerance are interchangeable terms.

Answer: B

32. What is your experience with disaster recovery planning?

Answer: Depending on the organization, you should describe your experience with disaster recovery planning, including business continuity planning, backup and recovery solutions, and failover mechanisms.

33. What is your experience with performance testing?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with performance testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, or Locust, including benchmarking, load simulation, and results analysis.

34. What is the role of incident management in SRE?

Answer: Incident management is a critical aspect of SRE that involves defining incident response procedures, managing stakeholders and communication, conducting post-mortem analysis, and ensuring system recovery.

35. What is the role of on-call rotation in SRE?

Answer: On-call rotation is a crucial aspect of SRE that involves ensuring 24/7 support for production systems, enabling quick incident response and resolution, and ensuring system reliability.

36. What is your experience with application monitoring?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with application monitoring tools such as New Relic, Datadog, or AppDynamics, including metrics analysis, log analysis, and APM.

37. How do you handle change requests?

Answer: You should describe your experience with change management processes, including reviewing, testing, approving, and deploying changes to production systems.

38. What is your experience with Kubernetes?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with Kubernetes container orchestration, including deployment, scaling, management, and troubleshooting.

39. What is the role of resilience engineering in SRE?

Answer: Resilience engineering is a discipline that focuses on improving system resilience and reliability, involving techniques such as chaos engineering, fault injection, and disaster recovery planning.

40. What is your experience with synthetic monitoring?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with synthetic monitoring tools such as Pingdom, Uptime Robot or Site24x7, including simulating user traffic and monitoring system response times.

41. How do you handle incident communication?

Answer: You should describe your experience with incident communication procedures, including stakeholder management, incident updates, and post-mortem analysis.

42. What is your experience with DNS management?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with DNS management, including DNS infrastructure, DNS security, and DNS performance optimization.

43. What is your experience with vulnerability management?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with vulnerability management, including identification, assessment, mitigation, and reporting.

44. What is the role of capacity planning in SRE?

Answer: Capacity planning is a critical aspect of SRE that involves predicting system capacity and planning for future growth, ensuring that systems are ready to handle increased loads and traffic.

45. What is your experience with incident response automation?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with incident response automation tools such as PagerDuty, VictorOps or OpsGenie, including triaging, notification, and escalation.

46. What is your experience with log management?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with log management tools such as Splunk, ELK Stack or Graylog, including log aggregation, analysis, search, and visualization.

47. What is the role of backup and recovery in SRE?

Answer: Backup and recovery is a critical aspect of SRE that involves ensuring that system data is backed up and recoverable in case of data loss or system failure.

48. What is your experience with network management?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with network management, including network infrastructure, network security, and network performance optimization.

49. What is your experience with cloud migration?

Answer: Depending on your experience, you should describe your expertise with cloud migrations, including planning, implementation, and post-migration testing and analysis.

50. What is the role of incident prioritization in SRE?

Answer: Incident prioritization is a crucial aspect of SRE that involves prioritizing incidents based on their severity, impact on users, and business-criticality, ensuring the most significant incidents are addressed first.

Ashwani Kumar
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