Devops · intermediate
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Fundamentals
Master the principles and practices of Site Reliability Engineering as pioneered at Google and adopted by modern engineering organizations. This intermediate course covers SLOs and error budgets, incident management, observability, toil elimination, and capacity planning so you can run production services that are reliable, scalable, and operationally sustainable. By the end you will be able to design and operate an SRE program that balances feature velocity with reliability commitments.
- 12 hours
- 25 lessons
- 6 modules
- updated May 2026
Try it before you sign up
Read a full lesson and answer 3 questions from the Module 1 quiz. No account needed.
What Site Reliability Engineering Really Is
6 modules, 25 lessons
Module 1 is free — lessons, hands-on walkthrough and quiz.
- readWhat Site Reliability Engineering Really Is25 min
- videoVideo: Intro to SRE15 min
- hands-onLab: Measuring Baseline Reliability25 min
- quizQuiz: SRE Principles10 min
Built by the CloudaQube team
No celebrity instructor — here is exactly what goes into the course instead.
- 01 7 guided hands-on walkthroughs you run in a real environment.
- 02 6 module quizzes — every answer comes with an explanation.
- 03 Last updated May 2026.
- 04 Any module can become a hands-on lab in Labs Studio.
What you'll be able to do
- 01 Explain core SRE principles and how they relate to DevOps culture
- 02 Define service level indicators, objectives, and error budgets for a real service
- 03 Lead incident response using severity tiers, an Incident Commander model, and blameless postmortems
- 04 Instrument services using the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, traces)
- 05 Identify and eliminate toil through automation, runbooks, and self-healing systems
- 06 Plan capacity using load testing, headroom analysis, and degradation strategies
- 07 Design an end-to-end reliability framework for a production service
- — Comfort with Linux command line and basic shell scripting
- — Familiarity with monitoring concepts (metrics, alerts, dashboards)
- — Working knowledge of HTTP, REST APIs, and web service architecture
- — Awareness of distributed systems concepts (load balancing, replication, failure modes)
- — Basic experience with at least one cloud platform or container runtime
Before you start
How long does it take?
About 12 hours of lessons, videos and hands-on walkthroughs across 6 modules.
What’s free?
Module 1 in full — lessons, hands-on walkthrough and quiz — with no card required. Any paid plan (from $8.99/mo) unlocks all 6 modules, and starts with a 14-day free trial.
Start the course with Module 1 free.
No card required. Unlock every module from $8.99/mo when you’re ready.