Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) — Google Practices
A two-day implementation workshop on SRE — designing SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for a real service, structuring incident management with blameless postmortems, and systematically reducing toil in a team — for teams moving from SRE theory to concrete implementation.
From SRE theory to a concrete workshop outcome
Many SRE resources stop at the conceptual level: what an SLO is, what an error budget is. This workshop goes a step further — over two days, participants independently design SLIs and SLOs for a chosen service, basing decisions on real business requirements rather than textbook examples.
Incidents as a source of systemic knowledge
The blameless postmortem is one of Google SRE’s most recognizable practices, but it is hard to implement without a clear structure. The course teaches a concrete postmortem format — from incident response roles, through documenting systemic causes, to tracking action items — so that lessons from an incident genuinely reduce the risk of a repeat.
Toil as the enemy of team scalability
A team that spends most of its time on repetitive, manual tasks has no room for engineering work that builds lasting reliability. The final module teaches systematic toil identification and automation prioritization — a concrete, practical skill, not a general declaration to “automate more.”
Benefits
- Design SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) for a real service
- Build an error budget and an error-budget-based policy
- Structure an incident management process with roles and blameless postmortems
- Identify and systematically reduce toil in an operations team's daily work
Who is this training for?
Prerequisites
- Experience running production systems or working on an operations/DevOps team
- Basic familiarity with monitoring and distributed systems helps
Training program
SRE fundamentals — SLIs, SLOs, error budgets
- The difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA — definitions and practical use
- Choosing the right SLIs for different service types (latency, availability, throughput)
- Calculating and interpreting an error budget
- Error budget policy — how the error budget drives deployment decisions
Workshop: designing an SLO for a real service
- Analyzing business requirements and translating them into reliability goals
- Hands-on workshop: defining SLIs/SLOs step by step for a chosen service
- Measuring SLOs in practice — data sources and monitoring tools
- Communicating SLOs to business and product teams
Incident management
- Incident response team structure: incident commander, roles, escalation
- Runbooks and response procedures for common incident classes
- Blameless postmortems — structure, facilitation, drawing systemic conclusions
- Tracking postmortem action items and preventing recurring incidents
Reducing toil and building an SRE culture
- Google SRE's definition of toil and methods for identifying it
- Prioritizing automation: what to automate first
- Building an SRE culture: balancing new features against reliability
- Negotiating reliability priorities with the business using error-budget data
Delivery Methods
Online
- Convenience of participating from anywhere
- Interactive live sessions with trainer
- Materials available for 30 days
- No travel costs
On-site
- Direct contact with trainer and group
- Intensive hands-on workshops
- Networking with other participants
- Full focus on learning
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the three existing SRE courses in our catalog?
The existing courses (Site Reliability Engineering — Principles and Practices, Site Reliability Engineering — Google SRE Practices and Monitoring, SRE Fundamentals) are overview-oriented — they introduce SRE concepts, monitoring, and chaos engineering. This course is deliberately narrower and deeper: a two-day implementation workshop in which participants independently design SLIs/SLOs for a real service, structure an incident management process, and identify concrete toil to reduce in their own team — with a tangible workshop outcome, not just theoretical knowledge.
What is the difference between SLI, SLO, and SLA, and why does the distinction matter so much?
An SLI (Service Level Indicator) is a concrete, measurable metric (e.g., the percentage of successful requests), an SLO (Service Level Objective) is an internal target for that metric (e.g., 99.9% successful requests in a 30-day window), and an SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a formal, often contractual commitment to a customer with financial consequences. Confusing these terms leads to poor decisions — for example, treating an internal target as a hard contractual obligation. The workshop teaches how to design SLIs/SLOs independent of any SLAs.
What is a blameless postmortem and why is 'blameless' the key word?
A blameless postmortem is an incident analysis focused on systemic causes (processes, tooling, missing safeguards) rather than blaming a specific person for a mistake. A blame culture makes engineers hide problems instead of reporting them, which in the long run increases the number and severity of incidents. The course teaches a concrete structure for running such a postmortem and extracting lasting process improvements from it.
What exactly does 'toil' mean in SRE terminology, and how does it differ from ordinary operational work?
Toil is operational work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, reactive, and provides no lasting value (it does not scale with system size) — as opposed to engineering work, which builds lasting improvements. Google SRE recommends limiting toil to no more than 50% of a team's time. The workshop teaches how to identify toil in daily work and prioritize what to automate first.
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