IBM Cloud Associate SRE case studies
IBM Cloud Associate SRE · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The IBM Cloud Associate SRE credential is aimed at engineers who keep workloads on IBM Cloud available, observable, and fast to recover. It is an associate-level certification: it assumes you already touch cloud infrastructure and want to prove you can apply site reliability discipline - SLIs and SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems, automation - inside IBM Cloud's service catalogue rather than in the abstract. The exam follows the reliability lifecycle. Expect questions on writing service-level objectives and using error budgets to arbitrate release decisions; instrumenting with IBM Cloud Monitoring and Log Analysis and keeping alerts actionable; running incidents, writing postmortems, and converting findings into preventive automation; building delivery pipelines and infrastructure as code; and operating the platform itself - VPC networking, load balancing, IAM, key management, capacity and quota management, and performance troubleshooting. The IBM Cloud Associate SRE case studies are 5 cases and about 3,089 words.
1Error Budget Burn on a Checkout API
Your team runs a checkout API on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service across three availability zones in Dallas. The service-level objective is 99.9% availability over a rolling 30-day window, which allows about 43 minutes of unavailability.
693 words, about 3 min2Alert Fatigue and a Missed Latency SLO
An e-commerce platform runs 60 services on IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud Monitoring receives about 1,200 alerts per week; 82% are closed by the on-call engineer without a change, and 31% are duplicates from the same root cause.
608 words, about 3 min3Incident Command Gap During a Payments Outage
At 02:14 UTC on Saturday, the payments API on IBM Cloud returns 5xx errors for 35% of requests. The incident commander role is not assigned until 02:32, after a customer escalates.
574 words, about 3 min4Progressive Delivery and a Shared Admin Key
A team deploys 12 containerized services to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. They average 18 production deployments per week.
597 words, about 3 min5Cross-Region Failover Misses a Five-Minute RTO
A global SaaS provider runs an active-passive setup between Dallas and Frankfurt on IBM Cloud VPC. IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS) global load balancer sends traffic to the Dallas VPC application load balancer; Frankfurt is standby.
617 words, about 3 min