Site reliability engineers are responsible for ensuring the availability of a website by putting in place and maintaining systems to support the site’s users. In addition, they work with designers, developers, and other team members to develop and maintain the website’s infrastructure. Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions can provide a valuable perspective on how to design, test, and maintain your website’s security and performance. This article will discuss common SRE interview questions and what to expect from the interviewer. Here are the top 30+ Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions with Answers:
Table of Contents
Question 01: What does a site reliability engineer do?
Answers: A site reliability engineer (SRE) is a type of systems administrator responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and security of a company’s website or application. SREs are often responsible for monitoring and responding to incidents and working with developers to prevent outages.
Question 02: What skills are needed for site reliability engineers?
Answers: There is no write-size-fits-all answer to this critical question, as the skills needed for site reliability engineers will vary depending on the particular organization and its needs. However, common skills often required for this position include experience with monitoring and logging tools, configuration management, and automation. Additionally, site reliability engineers should have strong problem-solving skills and effectively communicate with other organization members.
Question 03: What is a Site Reliability Engineer?
Answers: A site reliability engineer is an engineering role that is responsible for the availability, performance, and efficiency of a company’s production systems. A site reliability engineer’s job is to ensure that the systems they are responsible for run smoothly and efficiently. They may also be responsible for incident response and root cause analysis.
Question 04: What’s the difference between DevOps and SRE?
Answers: The main difference between DevOps and SRE is that DevOps is a culture and set of practices that aim to increase the speed and quality of software development. At the same time, SRE is a set of engineering practices that aim to ensure that software systems are highly available and scalable.
Question 05: What is observability, and how can organizations’ systems observability improve?
Answers: Observability is the practice of monitoring your system in a manner where you can identify issues and correct them as they happen. Organizations should consider using a combination of tools and techniques to improve observability, including logging, monitoring, and tracing.
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Question 06: What are some essential skills for a site reliability engineer?
Answers: Site reliability engineers are essential for ensuring the success of any site. They must identify and diagnose problems quickly and accurately and understand the site’s infrastructure and components. Additionally, they must be able to develop and apply potential communication systems.
Some essential skills for a site reliability engineer to have are:
- The ability to write code and automation scripts
- The ability to troubleshoot and debug issues
- The ability to work with different teams to resolve issues
- The ability to effectively communicate with others
- The ability to document procedures and processes
Question 07: How would you describe the functions of an ideal DevOps team?
Answers: There is no accurate answer to this question as it depends on the organization’s specific needs. However, in general, an ideal DevOps team would be responsible for automating the software development and deployment process and providing tools and infrastructure to support continuous delivery. The team would also monitor the system to make sure it runs smoothly and potentially.
Question 08: How would you go about troubleshooting a website outage?
Answers: When it comes to website outages, there are various substantial ways to go about them. Some people troubleshoot the issue using a computer with many resources, while others use a phone or an app. Whichever process you choose, it is necessary that you first determine the cause of the outage. If you can’t find the answer to your question online, you will need to check with your hosting company or your website’s administrator.
There are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot a website outage:
- Check if the website is down for everyone or just you. You can do this using a site like Down for Everyone or Just Me.
- If the site is down for everyone, check the website’s status page (if it has one) to see if there is any information on the outage.
- If the website is only down for you, try clearing your web browser’s cookies and cache and then reloading the page.
- If the website is still down, try accessing it from various browsers or devices.
- If the website is still down, contact the website’s owner or host to report the outage.
Question 09: What is cloud computing?
Answers: Cloud computing serves computing services—including software, databases, networking, servers, storage, intelligence, and analytics—over the Internet to offer faster innovation, economies of scale, and flexible resources.
Question 10: Which of the three pillars of observability is most important to you?
Answers: It depends on the situation. For example, monitoring would be the most critical pillar if you are trying to diagnose a problem.
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Question 11: Enlist some TCP connection lists.
Answers: TCP is a networking protocol that allows two hosts to communicate with each other. TCP connects hosts by sending and receiving packets. A host can listen to one port and receive packets from other hosts on another port. Unfortunately, TCP also provides an unreliable way to communicate between hosts.
- HTTP
- HTTPS
- SSH
- FTP
- Telnet
- SMTP
- IMAP
- POP3
- LDAP
- DNS
Question 12: what would be your priorities during your first few weeks on the job?
Answers: Assuming you have been given the job, your priorities during the first few weeks would be to get to know the company and its policies and the people you will be working with and to begin developing a work schedule.
Question 13: What are large-scale systems?
Answers: Large-scale systems are too large to be studied using traditional methods. They are typically studied using computer simulations.
Question 14: Enlist all the Linux signals you are aware of.
Answers: Linux is a Unix-like operating system in the early 1990s. It is used on millions of computers around the world, and it can be used to run many different programs. Linux signals include: SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGTRAP, SIGABRT, SIGBUS, SIGFPE, SIGUSR1, SIGSEGV, SIGUSR2, SIGTERM, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT, SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP
Question 15: What is the most crucial aspect of site reliability engineering?
Answers: Site reliability engineering has many aspects, but monitoring is essential. Without monitoring, it would be difficult to identify and diagnose problems.
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Question 16: What activity means Reducing Toil?
Answers: Reducing Toil means making things easier, so people don’t have to work hard. This can be done by automating tasks, simplifying processes, or providing better tools.
Question 17: How often do you perform manual or automated tests?
Answers: I typically perform manual tests all the time I create a change to my code. For automated tests, I usually have a suite of unit tests that I run every time I make a change to my code.
Question 18: Define the Error budget policy.
Answers: The Error budget policy is the amount of error allowed in a system. This budget is typically set by upper management and is used to determine how many resources to allocate to quality control.
Question 19: Have you ever heard of SLO? If yes, then explain.
Answers: Slo is an acronym for “Student Learning Outcomes.” Slo’s are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based objectives teachers can set for their students to gauge and improve student learning.
Question 20: How do you differentiate between process and thread?
Answers: A process is an instance of a program being executed. A thread is a unit of redaction within a step.
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Question 21: What is the difference between the seat and donate?
Answers: SNAT is a network address translation used to change the source IP address of outbound traffic. DNAT is a Destination network address translation used to change the destination IP address of inbound traffic.
Question 22: Can you describe the Best SRE Tools for each Stage of DevOps?
Answers: There is no one-size-accurate-all write answer to this valuable question, as the top SRE tools for each stage of DevOps will vary depending on the organization’s specific needs. However, some standard tools that may be used during different stages of DevOps include configuration management tools (such as Puppet or Chef), continuous integration and delivery tools (such as Jenkins or Travis CI), and container orchestration tools (such as Kubernetes or Docker Compose).
Question 23: How will you secure your Docker containers?
Answers: There are many ways to secure Docker containers. Some standard methods include using a firewall, SSL/TLS, and role-based access control.
Question 24: How do you analyze the software deployment pipeline to identify ways to improve efficiency?
Answers: There are many ways to analyze the software deployment pipeline to mark ways to improve efficiency. One way is to look at the number of deployments over time. If there are a lot of deployments, it may be needed to optimize the pipeline. Another way to analyze the pipeline is to look at the time it takes to full each pipeline stage. Again, if one stage takes a long time, it may be essential to optimize it.
Question 25: How can you scale information technology infrastructure?
Answers: Adding more capacity is the most common way to scale infrastructure. This can be done by adding more servers, storage, networking, and other components.
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Question 26: What are some deployment strategies?
Answers: There are many deployment strategies, and the best one to use depends on the specific application and infrastructure. Some common deployment strategies include canary releases, A/B testing, and blue/green deployments.
Question 27: How do you monitor database query times?
Answers: There are a few various ways to monitor database query times. One way is to use the built-in performance monitoring tools with most database management systems. These crucial tools can serve detailed information about the time it takes for each query to execute.
Another way to monitor database query times is to use a 3rd-party monitoring tool. These tools can provide even more detailed information about query performance, including the ability to track slow queries over time.
Finally, you can also monitor database query times manually by running queries and timing how long they take to execute. This can be a valuable way to troubleshoot slow queries or to determine which queries are most important to optimize.
Question 28: What is SRE in simple terms?
Answers: SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. It is a practice that aims to help organizations manage and improve the availability, performance and security of their online services.
Question 29: What is the future of SRE?
Answers: The future of SRE is to continue to grow in popularity as a field and to continue to evolve. There is much interest in SRE now, and it will only continue to risers. As a result, there will continue to be challenges and opportunities for SREs to solve.
Question 30: What is the error budget SRE?
Answers: The error budget is the amount of time or money a company is willing to spend on errors. It is generally expressed as a percentage of the total budget. For example, if a company has a budget of $100,000 and an error budget of 10%, it is willing to spend up to $10,000 on errors.
Question 31: Do Site reliability engineers make more than software engineers?
Answers: There is no exact answer to this excellent question, as salaries can vary depending on the company, location, experience, and many other reasons. However, in general, site reliability engineers tend to earn more than software engineers. This is because site reliability engineering is a relatively new field, and there is a high demand for qualified candidates.
Question 32: Is SRE better than software engineering?
Answers: There is no standard answer to this question as it depends on the individual needs and goals of the organization. SRE may be a better fit for organizations that place a higher priority on availability and uptime. In comparison, software engineering may be better for organizations prioritizing creating robust and scalable software applications.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions are a great way to get a feel for the individual’s experience and understanding of the Site Reliability Engineering process. The questions can also help to assess the candidates’ knowledge of the Site Reliability Engineering concepts. I hope these top 30+ Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions with Answers are constructive for everyone. Thanks for reading about the top 30+ Site Reliability Engineer Interview Questions with Answers.