Top 15 SRE Interview Questions and Answers (2025 Edition)

 

🔹 Introduction

Preparing for a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) interview in 2025?
Whether you’re a fresher or experienced DevOps engineer, these 15 must-know SRE interview questions will help you crack the toughest interviews — from Google to startup unicorns.

Let’s dive in. 🚀

🔸 Question 1: What is SRE?

Answer:
Site Reliability Engineering is a practice developed by Google that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations problems. Its goal is to create scalable and reliable software systems.

🔸 Question 2: What are SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs?

Answer:

  • SLI (Service Level Indicator): A measurable metric (e.g., uptime, latency).

  • SLO (Service Level Objective): Target goal for the SLI (e.g., 99.9% uptime).

  • SLA (Service Level Agreement): A formal agreement with penalties if SLOs aren’t met.

🔸 Question 3: What is an Error Budget?

Answer:
An error budget is the maximum acceptable level of failure. It balances innovation and reliability by allowing controlled risk (e.g., 0.1% downtime/month).

🔸 Question 4: How is SRE different from DevOps?

FeatureSREDevOps
OriginGoogleIndustry-wide practice
FocusReliability & automationCollaboration & delivery
Metric BasedYes (SLO, SLI, Error Budget)Not always
Incident HandlingStrong emphasisVaries by org

🔸 Question 5: What tools are commonly used in SRE?

  • Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana

  • Logging: ELK Stack, Loki

  • Alerting: Alertmanager, PagerDuty

  • IaC: Terraform, Ansible

  • Containers: Docker, Kubernetes

  • Scripting: Bash, Python, Go

🔸 Question 6: How do you handle an incident?

Answer:

  1. Detect the issue (monitoring/alerting)

  2. Acknowledge & communicate

  3. Mitigate or rollback

  4. Perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

  5. Write postmortem

  6. Improve process

🔸 Question 7: What is Toil and why reduce it?

Answer:
Toil is repetitive, manual, and automatable work. It’s non-scalable and non-creative. SREs aim to automate toil to focus on high-impact engineering.

🔸 Question 8: What is the “Four Golden Signals” of monitoring?

  1. Latency – Time to serve requests

  2. Traffic – Volume of requests

  3. Errors – Rate of failed requests

  4. Saturation – System capacity/utilization

🔸 Question 9: What is a Postmortem?

Answer:
A postmortem is a blameless report after an incident. It documents what happened, why it happened, impact, and how to prevent it in future.

🔸 Question 10: What is a Canary Deployment?

Answer:
Canary deployment is a technique to release software to a small subset of users before rolling it out to everyone — to detect issues early.

🔸 Question 11: What is Chaos Engineering?

Answer:
Chaos engineering is the practice of intentionally injecting failure into systems to test resilience. Popular tools: Chaos Monkey, LitmusChaos

🔸 Question 12: What is MTTR?

Answer:

  • MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery): Average time taken to recover after a failure.

  • Lower MTTR = better system reliability.

🔸 Question 13: How do you ensure high availability?

Answer:

  • Load balancing

  • Redundancy (multi-zone setup)

  • Health checks

  • Auto-scaling

  • Failover systems

🔸 Question 14: What’s the role of Kubernetes in SRE?

Answer:
Kubernetes helps SREs by:

  • Automating deployment, scaling, and management

  • Handling rollbacks

  • Managing service discovery

  • Ensuring reliability via auto-healing pods

🔸 Question 15: What’s your strategy to reduce downtime?

Answer:

  • Real-time monitoring and alerting

  • Fast rollback mechanisms

  • Blue/Green or Canary deployments

  • Regular disaster recovery drills

🔹 Final Thoughts

SRE interviews don’t just test your knowledge — they assess how you think during failures, how you communicate, and how well you understand system reliability.

💡 Pro Tip: Prepare real examples from your past projects. SRE interviews often include scenario-based questions!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bamboo Installation and Configuration: A Step-by-Step Guide

Image
Bamboo is a powerful continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps organizations automate the building, testing, and deployment of their software applications. With its intuitive interface and powerful features, Bamboo makes it easy for teams to streamline their software delivery processes and improve the quality of their code. In this blog, we'll walk you through the process of installing and configuring Bamboo on your server. Whether you're a seasoned administrator or just getting started with Bamboo, this guide will help you get up and running in no time. Step 1: Prerequisites Before you start installing Bamboo, there are a few prerequisites you need to have in place: Java: Bamboo requires Java 8 or later to be installed on your server. Database: Bamboo supports a variety of databases, including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. You will need to have one of these databases installed and configured before installing Bamboo. Web Server: Bamboo...
Read more
 Top 10 AI Tools Transforming Daily Life in 2025 Discover the AI revolution of 2025! From productivity to creativity, these AI tools are changing how we work, learn, and live. Discover the most powerful AI tools of 2025 that are revolutionizing everyday tasks, boosting productivity, and simplifying your life. Introduction In 2025, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a buzzword – it’s a reality embedded in our daily lives. From automating tasks to enhancing creativity, AI tools are reshaping how we work, think, and live. Whether you're a student, a freelancer, a business owner, or just a tech lover — these AI tools can boost your productivity and simplify your routine. Let’s explore the Top 10 AI tools that are transforming lives in 2025. 1. ChatGPT (by OpenAI) Best For: Writing, coding, learning Keyword: AI writing assistant ChatGPT remains a top choice for content creation, code assistance, and real-time conversations. It's like having a 24/7 writing part...
Read more

AWS Terminology 101: A Beginner's Guide

Image
  AWS (Amazon Web Services) is a powerful cloud computing platform that offers a range of services for businesses and individuals. To make the most of AWS, it's important to understand the key terminology used in the platform. In this blog, we'll take a look at some of the most important AWS terms and what they mean. Amazon Machine Image (AMI): An AMI is a pre-configured virtual machine image that you can use to quickly launch instances in the AWS cloud. An AMI includes the operating system, applications, and all necessary configurations, making it easy to get started with a new instance. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): EC2 is the computing service offered by AWS, and it allows you to run virtual machines in the cloud. EC2 provides scalable computing capacity, and you can choose from a variety of instance types and sizes to meet your computing requirements. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): S3 is a highly durable and scalable object storage service that allows you to s...
Read more