IBM Cloud Professional SRE study plan
IBM Cloud Professional SRE · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 7 hours per week
Site Reliability Engineering Foundations & IBM Cloud Platform Operations and Architecture
Define SLI, SLO, and error budget in your own words and map each to a concrete example from an IBM Cloud workload
Compare availability across IBM Cloud multi-zone regions versus single-zone deployments and state the failure domains each tolerates
Diagram how VPC, subnets, public gateways, and security groups combine into a resilient three-tier topology
Enumerate IBM Cloud account resources (resource groups, IAM, orgs and spaces) and explain how each scopes blast radius
Your checkpoint
A one-page reliability glossary plus an annotated architecture diagram of a multi-zone IBM Cloud VPC reference design, covering SLIs, failure domains, and resource scoping.
Site Reliability Engineering Foundations & Reliability Engineering, Capacity, and Performance
Calculate error budgets from an SLO and translate burn rate into an alerting threshold
Distinguish toil from engineering work and identify three recurring operational tasks in your environment to automate
Design a capacity model that projects compute and storage needs from a growth rate and a target headroom percentage
Explain how redundancy, replication, and failover strategies differ in cost and recovery characteristics
Your checkpoint
A written SLO specification for one service, including SLI definition, target, error budget policy, burn-rate alert thresholds, and a capacity projection table for the next two quarters.
Monitoring, Observability, and Incident Response
Instrument an application to emit structured logs, metrics, and distributed traces and route them to IBM Cloud Logs and IBM Cloud Monitoring
Construct a dashboard that separates symptom-based signals from cause-based signals for a single service
Write alert rules that fire on user-visible degradation rather than raw resource thresholds
Classify incidents by severity and document the escalation path and communication cadence for each level
Your checkpoint
A working observability bundle: dashboard definition, three symptom-based alert rules, and a severity matrix with escalation contacts and communication templates.
Monitoring, Observability, and Incident Response & Site Reliability Engineering Foundations
Run a blameless post-incident review on a simulated outage and produce a timeline from observability data
Identify contributing causes versus a single root cause and convert findings into tracked action items
Practice a live incident walkthrough where you detect, triage, and mitigate within a target time
Explain how chaos experiments validate monitoring coverage before real incidents occur
Your checkpoint
A completed post-incident review document for a simulated failure, including timeline, contributing factors, and at least five prioritized remediation items with owners.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code
Provision IBM Cloud infrastructure declaratively with Terraform, including provider authentication and remote state
Separate environments using workspaces or directory structure and explain the tradeoffs of each
Codify a repeatable pipeline that plans on pull request and applies on merge with approval gates
Detect and reconcile configuration drift between declared and deployed state
Your checkpoint
A version-controlled Terraform module that deploys a VPC with compute and storage, wired into a CI pipeline that runs plan on pull request and apply behind manual approval.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code & IBM Cloud Platform Operations and Architecture
Automate a runbook task with a scripted or Schematics-based workflow and add idempotency and failure handling
Compare IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud for operational overhead and scaling behavior
Design health checks and rolling update parameters that preserve availability during deploys
Document rollback procedures for both infrastructure changes and application releases
Your checkpoint
An automated runbook script or Schematics action with error handling plus a written rollback runbook covering infrastructure and application release paths.
Reliability Engineering, Capacity, and Performance & Security, Compliance, and Governance
Load test a service to find its saturation point and correlate results with resource metrics
Right-size compute and storage from observed utilization and state the cost and reliability impact of each change
Apply least-privilege IAM policies and service IDs and verify access with an audit of effective permissions
Configure encryption, key management, and activity logging to satisfy a stated compliance requirement
Your checkpoint
A performance and cost report containing load test results, saturation analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and an IAM access review summary with encryption and audit logging evidence.
Site Reliability Engineering Foundations & Monitoring, Observability, and Incident Response & Automation and Infrastructure as Code & IBM Cloud Platform Operations and Architecture & Reliability Engineering, Capacity, and Performance & Security, Compliance, and Governance
Synthesize all domains into a single architecture and operations narrative for one end-to-end service
Complete timed practice questions across every domain and review every missed item to its underlying concept
Close remaining gaps by revisiting the two weakest domains with targeted hands-on exercises
Rehearse explaining reliability tradeoffs aloud as you would in a design review
Your checkpoint
A full practice exam attempt with a scored gap analysis and a one-page end-to-end service design document covering SLOs, observability, automation, architecture, capacity, and security.
Milestones
Week 2: You can compute an error budget and burn rate from an SLO without notes and justify a burn-rate alert threshold.
Week 4: You have produced a complete post-incident review from observability data alone and can name the difference between contributing causes and root cause.
Week 6: You can deploy the same environment twice from code with identical results and roll it back using only your written runbook.
Week 8: You score above 80 percent on a full timed practice set and your gap analysis lists no domain below 70 percent.