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Top 22 SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) Interview Questions & Answers 2024

NovelVista
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Last updated 27/09/2024


Top 22 SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) Interview Questions & Answers 2024

Looking for DevOps SRE questions answers to crack interviews but not getting the best ones. Don’t worry! We got you. Sire Reliability Engineering brings great job opportunities for you. We cover everything you are looking for. Let’s Start.

Understand, what is SRE?

Computer systems are developed to be reliable. A system is reliable if, most of the time, it performs as intended and isn't prone to unexpected failures and bugs. The site engineer is responsible for the stability and performance of websites, mobile applications, web services, and other online services. SREs are in charge of monitoring the performance of websites and applications to check for issues and make sure they are running smoothly.

Site Reliability Engineering is usually a bridge between the Development and Operations Departments. It's the discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to infrastructure and operation issues. You can also get in-depth details regarding the SRE on our blog, An Insight to Site Reliability Engineering.  

In today's industrial sector, more and more jobs are opening up as a result of progress in technology. The position of SRE is one of those that has been around for that long. Hence, we have prepared the top 22 site reliability engineer interview questions for you. 

The job role of the Site Reliability Engineer includes the following responsibilities:

The job responsibilities of SRE can be differentiated into two categories: technical work and process work. Technical ones include things such as writing code to automate tasks, provisioning new servers, and troubleshooting outages when they occur.

Besides this process, one includes things such as on-call rotations, incident response, and reviewing post-incident reports. 

  • Developing software to help DevOps, ITOps and Support Teams
  • Fixing support escalation issues
  • Optimizing on-call rotations and processes
  • Documenting tribal knowledge
  • Conducting post-incident reviews 

Now, let's get into DevOps SRE interview questions and prepare ourselves. Following are the most commonly asked Site Reliability Engineering interview questions, which will help you understand how interesting it actually can be. 

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Most asked Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) interview questions

Q1. Differentiate between DevOps and SRE.

Answer: Implementing new features: DevOps is responsible for developing new feature requests to the product, whereas SREs ensure those new changes don’t increase the overall failure rates in production.

Procedure flow: The DevOps team has the perspective of the development environment to make changes from development to production. SREs have a viewpoint of production, so they can make propositions to the development team to border the let-down rates notwithstanding the new variations. 

Incident handling: DevOps teams work on the incident feedback to mitigate the issue, whereas SRE conducts the post-incident reviews to identify the root cause and document the findings to offer feedback to the core development team. 

Q2. Why do you want to do a job in SRE?

Answer: I am drawn to a career in the SRE sector due to its dynamic and challenging nature. It combines my passion for software development and operations, which provides the unique opportunity to bridge the gap between these two crucial aspects of technology. 

The SRE role is well-aligned with my goal of ensuring the reliability, scalability and efficiency of systems that contribute to a seamless user experience. 

Q3. Do you know anything about SLO?

Answer: The SLO stands for Service Level Objective, which is the agreement within the SLA about a specific metric, such as uptime or response time. 

They are agreed-upon targets within an SLA, which might be achieved for each activity, function and process to provide the best opportunity for consumer success. It also includes business matrices like conversion rates, uptime and availability.

Q4. What is Data Structure? Elaborate some of them.

Answer: The data structure is the way of organizing and storing the data in the computer so that it can be accessed and manipulated efficiently.

There is a wide range of data structures that serve various purposes, and the choice of the specific data structure depends on the needs of the algorithms or operations being performed. 

Arrays, Linked Lists, Stacks, Trees, Heaps, and Hash tables are the types of data structures.

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Q5. How do you differentiate between process and thread?

Process

Thread

When the program is under execution then it’s known as a process.

The segment of the process is known as the thread.

It takes the maximum time to stop.

It consumes less time to stop.

It requires more time for work and conception.

It takes less time for work and conceptions.

When it comes to communication it is not that most effective.

It is much more effective in terms of communication.

If one procedure is obstructed then it will not affect the operation of another procedure.

If one thread the obstructed then it will affect the execution of another process.


Q6. Elaborate on the Error Budgets and what error budgets are used.

Answer:  An error budget is how much downtime a system can afford without upsetting consumers, or it is also known as the margin of error permitted by the service level objective.

It encourages the teams to minimize actual incidents and maximize innovation by taking risks within acceptable limits. 


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Q7. What is the definition of error budget policy?

An error budget policy is used to track if the company is meeting contractual promises for the system or service and prevents it from pursuing too much innovation at the expense of the system or service’s reliability. 

Q8. Which activities help reduce toil?

Answer: Activities that can reduce the toil are creating external automation, creating internal automation, and enhancing the service so that it does not require maintenance intervention. 

Q9. What are the Service Level Indicators?

Answer:  A service level indicator is the specific metric that helps businesses measure aspects of the level of services to their consumers.

SLIs are smaller sub-sections of SLOs, which are, in turn, part of SLAs that have an impact on overall service reliability. They help businesses identify ongoing network and application issues to lead to more efficient recoveries. 

Q10. List down the Linux signals you know.

  • SIGHUP
  • SIGINT
  • SIGQUIT
  • SIGFPF
  • SIGKILL
  • SIGALRM
  • SIGTERM

Q11. Do you know TCP?

Answer:  Transmission Control Protocol, which stands for TCP, is one of the main protocols of the Internet Protocol suite. It lies among the application and network layers, which are mainly used to offer reliable delivery services. It is the connection-based protocol for communications that supports the exchange of messages between different devices over the network. 

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Q12. List down a few TCP connection states.

  • LISTEN: The server is listed on a port like HTTP.
  • SYNC-SENT: I sent a SYN request and waiting for a response.
  • SYN-RECEIVED: The server waits for an ACK, which occurs after sending an ACK from the server.
  • ESTABLISHED: A 3-way TCP handshake has been completed.

Q13. What is defined as an Inode?

Answer:  Inode is the data structure in the UNIX, which includes the metadata about the file. Some of the items in the inode are mode, OWNER (UID, GID), size, time, and time.

Q14. What are the Linux kill commands and their functions?

Answer:  Killall: This command is used to kill all the processes with a particular name.

PKill: This command is like kill all, except it kills only processes with partial names.

Xkill: This command allows users to kill the command by clicking on the window.

Q15. What is cloud computing?

Answer: Cloud computing refers to the practice of storing and accessing data and applications on remote servers hosted over the internet, as opposed to local servers or the computer's hard drive.

Cloud computing, often known as Internet-based computing, is a technique in which the user receives a resource as a service via the Internet. Files, pictures, papers, and other storable materials can all be considered types of data that are saved. 

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Top 100+ Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Interview Questions

Q16. Describe the functions of the ideal DevOps team.

Answer: Basically, the functions of the ideal DevOps team can't be precisely defined. As we know, the DevOps team bridges the development and operations departments and contributes to continued delivery. 

The perfect DevOps team cooperatively combines software development and IT operations to improve productivity, speed, and dependability across the software delivery lifecycle.

Among the responsibilities are continuous Integration, automated testing, deployment automation, monitoring, and cultivating an environment of communication and cooperation between the development and operations teams.

Q17. What is Observability, and how can we improve a business's system observability?

Answer: Observability strongly emphasizes gathering and analyzing information from various sources to comprehend a system's behavior as a whole. 

Teams can efficiently monitor, debug, and optimize their systems thanks to the core analysis loop, which is a continuous cycle of data gathering, analysis, and action.

To maximize observability, discern the data flowing in an environment, focusing on relevant types for goals. Distill, curate, and transform data into actionable insights, providing valuable clues about DevOps maturity.


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Q18. What is the DHCP and its use?

Answer: The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP for short, is a protocol that allows IP addresses to be distributed throughout a network quickly, automatically, and centrally. Additionally, it is used to set up the device's DNS server details, default gateway, and subnet mask.

It's used to automatically request networking settings and IP addresses from the Internet service provider (ISP). Also, the requirement for manual IP address assignment to all network devices by users or network administrators is lowered.

Q19. Elaborate on the difference between snat and dnat.

SNAT

DNAT

A single public IP address can be shared by several internal devices thanks to SNAT, which changes the source IP address of outgoing packets.

Incoming packets' destination IP address is changed by DNAT to route traffic to particular internal servers.

For packets exiting a network, it is often used to transform the private address or port into the public address or port.

Incoming packets having a public address or port as their destination are often redirected to a private IP address or port within the network.

It allows multiple hosts on the inside to get any host on outside.

It allows multiple hosts on the outside to get the single host on inside. 

 

Q20. What are Hardlink and Soft Links? Suggest an example.

Answer: Hard Link: A hard link is a duplicate of the source file that acts as a pointer to the original, enabling access to it even if the source file is moved or erased. Hard links are different from soft links in that changes made to one file affect other files, and the rigid connection persists even if the original file is removed from the system.

Soft Link: A brief pointer file that connects a filename to a pathname is called a soft link. Like the Windows OS shortcut option, it's nothing more than a shortcut to the original file. Without the actual contents of the file, the soft link functions as a reference to another file. Users can remove the soft links without impacting the contents of the original file.

Example: $ novel hard link. file

Q21. How will you secure your docker containers?

Answer: With the help of the following steps, I will keep my docker containers safe:

  • Carefully select third-party containers.
  • Turn on Docker content trust.
  • Establish a resource cap for each of your containers.
  • Examine a third-party security instrument.
  • Employ Security on Docker Bench

Q22. Describe the best SRE tools for DevOps.

  • Jira: It aids in organizing, monitoring, and overseeing software development initiatives. It makes it easier for teams to work together and permits the development of thorough roadmaps.
  • Git: For cooperative development and version control.
  • Jenkins: Jenkins is an automated server that facilitates code development, testing, and deployment. To automate pipelines for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), it may be coupled with Git.
  • Selenium: An open-source program for automating browser tests that are helpful for web application development.
  • Junit: One popular Java testing framework for unit testing is JUnit (also known as TestNG).
  • Gatling: It is a web application performance testing tool.

Conclusion

The above site reliability engineer interview questions are most of the communal questions that will help you to prepare for the interview. With the help of this, you will fill much more acknowledged.

We hope you understand the practical and theoretical knowledge of DevOps SRE interview. It allows you to gather details and demonstrate your interest. You can leave a positive impression on the interviewer.

SRE interview questions and answers will not only help you with the interview but also help you develop basic understanding of SRE. To explore more, make sure to join our SRE Practitioner Training & Certification.

Topic Related Post
DevOps Trends in 2024: The Continued Rise of GitOps, Data Observability, and Security
Building a High-Performing SRE Team: Key Strategies and Best Practices
Securing the Pipeline: Integrating Security into Your SRE Practices

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