IBM Cloud Associate SRE study plan
IBM Cloud Associate SRE · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 6 hours per week
SRE principles and service reliability & IBM Cloud infrastructure and services
Define SLI, SLO, and error-budget policy for two services with different criticality levels.
Map a request path across VPC, public gateway, IKS ingress, and Cloud Object Storage to identify failure domains.
Provision a small VPC and IKS cluster with the IBM Cloud CLI and verify kubectl access.
Write a failure-mode catalog ranking each dependency by likelihood and blast radius.
Your checkpoint
Two-page reliability baseline: SLO table for two services, annotated VPC-to-IKS architecture, and a top-10 failure-mode catalog.
IBM Cloud infrastructure and services & Capacity, performance, and troubleshooting
Deploy a containerized workload to IKS with resource requests, limits, and a horizontal pod autoscaler.
Capture CPU, memory, latency, and error-rate baselines in IBM Cloud Monitoring.
Run a stepped load test and calculate the saturation point and available headroom.
Right-size worker pools and document the quota constraints that limit scaling.
Your checkpoint
Load-test report with p95/p99 latency, saturation threshold, worker-pool sizing recommendation, and quota math.
Monitoring, observability, and alerting
Instrument a service with OpenTelemetry or Prometheus endpoints and ship metrics to IBM Cloud Monitoring.
Build one dashboard per service tier using RED and USE signals.
Design five symptom-based alerts with severity, threshold, and runbook link, and remove cause-based noise.
Route platform logs and Activity Tracker events to a central instance and verify retention.
Your checkpoint
Observability pack: dashboard specification, five alert rules with thresholds and runbooks, and log-routing verification notes.
Capacity, performance, and troubleshooting & Monitoring, observability, and alerting
Inject three faults (pod crash, CPU stress, dependency latency) and diagnose each using metrics, logs, and traces.
Apply USE and RED methods to isolate the bottleneck layer in each fault.
Calculate capacity headroom for 2x traffic and identify the first scaling limit.
Document a troubleshooting decision tree from symptom to evidence to fix.
Your checkpoint
Troubleshooting journal covering three faults with evidence, root cause, fix, and a 2x headroom calculation.
Incident response and postmortems & Automation and CI/CD for reliability
Assign incident roles (incident commander, communications lead, operations lead) and run a 30-minute simulated Sev-2.
Write a severity matrix and a communications cadence for internal and customer updates.
Draft a blameless postmortem with timeline, contributing factors, and action items.
Automate one runbook step with Schematics or Terraform and add a smoke-test and rollback gate to a CI pipeline.
Your checkpoint
Sev-2 postmortem with owned action items plus a CI pipeline stage that runs smoke tests and blocks rollout on failure.
Networking and traffic management
Diagram the traffic path from CIS DNS and TLS through a VPC load balancer and IKS ingress to pods.
Configure health checks, TLS termination, and a failover pool, then test failover behavior.
Compare security groups, network ACLs, and CIS firewall rules for a three-tier application.
Document when to choose Transit Gateway versus Direct Link for hybrid connectivity.
Your checkpoint
Traffic-path and failure matrix for a three-tier app covering DNS, TLS, load-balancer health checks, and failover test results.
Security, identity, and compliance
Build three access groups with least-privilege IAM policies and dedicated service IDs.
Store credentials in Secrets Manager and rotate one credential end to end.
Enable Key Protect and Activity Tracker, then run audit queries against the event stream.
Map collected evidence to at least five security and compliance controls.
Your checkpoint
IAM and secrets design: access-group matrix, rotation procedure, and five Activity Tracker audit queries with expected evidence.
SRE principles and service reliability & Monitoring, observability, and alerting & Incident response and postmortems
Take a timed 60-question mock exam and score results by domain.
Rebuild the two weakest domains with a hands-on lab rather than rereading notes.
Reconcile SLOs, alerts, and runbooks into a single on-call readiness checklist.
Write a 30-day practice plan targeting remaining gaps.
Your checkpoint
Scored mock exam with domain breakdown, remediation list, and a one-page on-call readiness checklist.
Milestones
Week 2: Deploy, load-test, and right-size an IKS workload without assistance, and explain p95 latency and headroom numbers from your own data.
Week 4: Diagnose three injected faults from dashboard evidence to root cause in under 10 minutes each and defend SLO thresholds with measurements.
Week 6: Trace a request from CIS through the VPC load balancer to a pod, predict behavior when one backend fails, and verify the prediction with a failover test.
Week 8: Score at least 80% on the mock exam and produce three review-ready artifacts: SLO table, alert pack, and blameless postmortem.