SRE Foundation case studies
SRE Foundation · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation℠ certification is a vendor-neutral, entry-level credential offered by DevOps Institute, now part of the PeopleCert Group. It is aimed at anyone who needs a shared vocabulary for reliability work: Site Reliability Engineers and engineers moving into the role, DevOps practitioners, software engineers, system integrators, consultants and change agents, plus IT directors, managers, team leaders, product owners and Scrum masters who sponsor or work alongside SRE teams. The SRE Foundation case studies are 5 cases and about 4,496 words.
1The 85% Burn in Nine Days
Checkout API publishes a 99.95% availability SLO over a rolling 28-day window, which allows about 20 minutes of unsuccessful requests per window. On day 9 of the current window, 85% of the budget is gone.
823 words, about 4 min234% Toil and Two Contractors
A 6-person platform team supports 400 engineers. A three-week time audit shows 34% of hours spent on a request queue (access grants, quota increases, TLS certificate renewals for 120 internal services on 90-day certs), 22% on project work, 18% on-call and incident response, 26% meetings and reviews.
849 words, about 4 min3Green Dashboards, Red Support Queue
A video-conferencing platform serves 12 regions. The primary dashboard shows a global availability SLI (successful joins / total join attempts) and a global latency SLI computed as p99 across all pooled requests.
898 words, about 4 min4The Same Outage, Three Times
In six months, a payments service has had three near-identical incidents: a configuration push to production flipped a routing flag, 30-40% of transactions failed for 12-45 minutes, and rollback took longer than the change itself. Each incident produced a postmortem.
993 words, about 5 min5Three SREs, Four Teams, No Leverage
An organization has 400 engineers and 3 SREs. Each SRE is embedded one-to-one with a product team, spending about 70% of the week on that team's operational work (dashboards, ticket handling, release babysitting) and 30% on reliability projects.
933 words, about 5 min