Cloud Reliability & Operations

What you will be able to do

• You will be able to instrument a cloud service and observe it with metrics, logs, and distributed traces so failures show up before users report them.
• You will be able to define SLIs and SLOs for a service and use an error budget to decide when to ship features and when to harden reliability.
• You will be able to design alerting that pages a human only on user-facing symptoms, cutting noise and alert fatigue while still catching real incidents.
• You will be able to architect for high availability using redundancy, health checks, load balancing, and multi-zone or multi-region failover to remove single points of failure.
• You will be able to build a disaster recovery plan with realistic RTO and RPO targets and pick the right strategy (backup and restore, pilot light, warm standby, or active-active) for the budget.
• You will be able to run a production incident end to end: detect, triage, assign incident command roles, mitigate, and communicate status clearly under pressure.
• You will be able to lead a blameless postmortem, turn it into tracked action items, and spot the toil worth automating away.

What is inside

4 modules, 8 lessons. Each module ends in a graded quiz and most carry an assignment.

1. 01

   Observability: Seeing Your System

   You cannot operate what you cannot see. This module builds the sensing layer of a reliable system. You will work through the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, and distributed traces), the four golden signals, and the tool categories that instrument them, including Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry. By the end you can build dashboards that tell a story and write alerts that page a human only when users actually feel something is wrong.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions

2. 02

   Reliability Targets: SLOs and Error Budgets

   Reliable is a number, not a feeling. This module gives you the language every SRE team runs on: service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and the error budget that turns an SLO into a decision-making tool. You will practice setting honest targets and using the error budget to referee the constant tension between shipping features and keeping the service up.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions · assignment

3. 03

   High Availability and Disaster Recovery

   Systems fail, so you engineer for failure on purpose. This module builds high availability through redundancy, health checks, load balancing, and multi-zone and multi-region failover, then turns to disaster recovery: setting RTO and RPO, choosing a backup strategy, and selecting DR patterns from backup and restore up to active-active. You finish by planning a game day, guided by NIST SP 800-34 and ISO 22301, so you prove your recovery works before a real outage does.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions

4. 04

   Incident Response and Continuous Improvement

   When the pager fires, calm and structure beat panic. This module runs a production incident end to end: on-call and triage, incident command roles, mitigation, and clear status communication while the clock is running. Then it closes the loop with blameless postmortems, tracked action items, and the ongoing work of reducing toil so the same fire does not start twice.

   2 lessons · 5 quiz questions · assignment