SRE Practitioner case studies
SRE Practitioner · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Practitioner certification is an advanced credential from DevOps Institute, positioned as a follow-on to the SRE Foundation certification for people who need to apply SRE practices rather than just describe them. The exam is 40 multiple-choice questions delivered web-based over 90 minutes, with a passing score of 65 percent; it is open book and available in English, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese. The certification is valid for three years and must be renewed, with DevOps Institute pointing candidates to its Continuous Professional Development and recertification requirements to keep skills current. The blueprint spans SRE culture and antipatterns, the organizational impact of adopting SRE, SLIs and SLOs in a distributed ecosystem plus extended use of error budgets, security and resilience by design in a zero-trust environment, full-stack observability with distributed tracing, AI-curated data for proactive and predictive incident management, DataOps and clean data lineage, platform engineering for consistency and predictability, practical chaos engineering, and major incident response responsibilities. The SRE Practitioner case studies are 5 cases and about 3,664 words.
1The Error Budget Is Empty and the Launch Is Committed
A retailer's checkout platform handles 12k rps at peak. The user-facing SLO is 99.9% of requests served in under 400 ms over a 28-day rolling window, measured at the edge load balancer.
834 words, about 4 min2Six SREs, Forty Teams, and a Request for Twelve More
Six SREs support 40 product teams on a shared Kubernetes platform. A time audit shows 68% of SRE hours go to ticket-driven work - certificate rotations, namespace and quota requests, dashboard fixes - plus pager triage for services the team does not own.
747 words, about 4 min3SEV-1 With an Incident Commander Who Is Also the Debugger
09:12 UTC: a global CDN provider begins returning 5xx from a subset of edge PoPs. Playback start rate for a media streaming app drops 60%.
726 words, about 4 min4Twelve Million Series and a One-Percent Sample
An e-commerce platform runs 400 services on Kubernetes. Distributed tracing is enabled everywhere at 1% head sampling.
660 words, about 3 min5Kill a Node on Black Friday
Three weeks before Black Friday, a VP asks the SRE team to "prove resilience" by killing a node in production during peak. The platform spans three AZs in one region.
697 words, about 3 min