Chapter 3 of 5 · Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
Applying site reliability engineering practices
SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, service lifecycle, capacity, autoscaling and incidents.
- 3topics
- 15 minfast track
- 2diagrams and exhibits
- 18%of the exam
Topics in this chapter
Take them in order, or jump to the one you need.
- 1SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, Error Budgets and the Cost of NinesDefine SLIs, SLOs and SLAs, compute error budgets, set burn rate alerts in Cloud Monitoring and weigh the opportunity cost of…Diagram5 min
- 2Service Lifecycle, Toil, Capacity Planning and AutoscalingManage the service lifecycle and toil, plan capacity with quotas, reservations and Dynamic Workload Scheduler, and autoscale…5 min
- 3Mitigating Incidents: Draining Traffic, Adding Capacity and RollbacksReduce incident impact on Google Cloud by draining or redirecting traffic, adding capacity and rolling back, with incident roles…Diagram5 min
About this chapter
What this chapter covers
Applying site reliability engineering practices is about 18% of the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer exam. It covers the SRE ideas that decide how fast a team can change a service and how it protects users when things go wrong.
It covers balancing change, velocity and reliability (SLIs such as availability and latency, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, Cloud Service Mesh service definitions and the cost of extra nines), managing the service lifecycle (planning, deployment, maintenance and retirement, toil, capacity planning with quotas, limits, reservations and Dynamic Workload Scheduler, and autoscaling for managed instance groups, Cloud Run and GKE) and mitigating incident impact (draining and redirecting traffic, adding capacity, rollback strategies and the incident process).
The exam has 50 to 60 multiple choice and multiple select questions in 2 hours. Questions here often give numbers, such as an SLO and an outage length, or describe an incident in progress and ask for the first action, ending "What should you do?".
How the topics fit together
SLOs turn reliability into a number the business agrees with. The error budget then decides when to ship faster and when to slow down, and incident practice protects the budget when something breaks.
In an incident question, the first step is almost always to reduce user impact (roll back, drain, add capacity), not to find the root cause. Root cause comes after service is restored.
How to use these pages
Each topic page has the same shape, so you can skim for what you need.
- What it is: the idea in plain words.
- How it works: the mechanism, with tables and code examples.
- What to remember for the exam: the facts to memorise and how questions are phrased.
- Common mistakes: the classic traps.
- Check yourself: three questions to test your understanding.
Ready for more practice?
The full Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer question bank has 751 questions, with timed practice exams and an explanation for every answer.
This study guide is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google Cloud. Vendor names, certification names and exam codes are trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification only.