Skip to main content

Site Reliability Engineer path

For engineers who keep production services up and want to know what their tools are doing underneath. The path builds a time-series database, a PromQL engine, an alert router, a log pipeline and a tracer, then turns them into SLOs with burn-rate alerts, an incident process and chaos experiments with a hypothesis. It starts from the Linux, network and Kubernetes internals that every one of those signals comes from, and ends with scheduled jobs, safe rollouts, DORA metrics and a triage agent.

Lessons appear here as they are published; prerequisites are listed on each lesson page.

Site Reliability Engineer · 38 lessons · 54.3 h
  1. Build The Lab: One Command That Proves Your Machine Is Ready · Phase 00 Setup & Lab · 60 min
  2. Build PID 1: Why Your Container Ignores Ctrl-C · Phase 01 Linux & Systems · 75 min
  3. Build File Descriptors: Too Many Open Files Is a Leak, Not a Limit · Phase 01 Linux & Systems · 75 min
  4. Build Every Error Message Is a System Call That Failed · Phase 01 Linux & Systems · 75 min
  5. Build A Service Is a Process With a Contract: systemd Units From Scratch · Phase 01 Linux & Systems · 90 min
  6. Build USE Before You Guess: CPU, Memory, Disk and PSI From /proc · Phase 01 Linux & Systems · 90 min
  7. Build A Route Is a Longest-Prefix Match Plus a Rule Table · Phase 02 Networking · 75 min
  8. Build Most Network Outages Are Timeouts You Did Not Set · Phase 02 Networking · 90 min
  9. Build HTTP/1.1 Is Text Over a Socket Until It Is Not · Phase 02 Networking · 90 min
  10. Build A Bash Script Is Only Safe With Strict Mode and Quotes · Phase 04 Scripting & Automation · 75 min
  11. Build Automating an API Is Pagination, Retries and Rate Limits · Phase 04 Scripting & Automation · 90 min
  12. Build cron Is a Clock, a Parser and a Missed-Run Policy · Phase 04 Scripting & Automation · 75 min
  13. Build Process Isolation: A Container Is Just a Process · Phase 05 Containers · 90 min
  14. Learn Images Are Just Layers · Phase 05 Containers · 45 min
  15. Build Build an Image Without a Dockerfile: Layers, Config and Manifest by Hand · Phase 05 Containers · 90 min
  16. Build A Container's Network Is a veth Pair, a Bridge and Three NAT Rules · Phase 05 Containers · 90 min
  17. Build Compose Is a Dependency Graph Over docker run · Phase 05 Containers · 90 min
  18. Build A Controller Is a Loop That Compares: Reconcilers From Scratch · Phase 06 Orchestration · 90 min
  19. Build A Scheduler Is Filter, Score, Bind · Phase 06 Orchestration · 90 min
  20. Build A Node Agent Turns a Pod Spec Into Processes · Phase 06 Orchestration · 90 min
  21. Build A Service Is a Virtual IP and a Rewrite Rule · Phase 06 Orchestration · 90 min
  22. Build Plan and Apply: A State File Is Just a Diff · Phase 07 Infrastructure as Code · 90 min
  23. Build Apply Order Is a Graph Walk · Phase 07 Infrastructure as Code · 90 min
  24. Build A Pipeline Is a Graph of Jobs in Clean Rooms · Phase 08 CI/CD & GitOps · 90 min
  25. Build GitOps Is a Reconciler Whose Desired State Is a Commit · Phase 08 CI/CD & GitOps · 120 min
  26. Build A Rollout Is a Loop That Watches a Metric · Phase 08 CI/CD & GitOps · 90 min
  27. Build A Release Is a Version, a Changelog and a Tag · Phase 08 CI/CD & GitOps · 75 min
  28. Build A Metric Is a Name, Labels and a Number Over Time · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  29. Build PromQL Is Vector Arithmetic Over Time Windows · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  30. Build An Alert Is a Query With a Clock and a Router · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  31. Build A Log Pipeline Is Tail, Parse, Label, Ship · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  32. Build A Trace Is a Tree Stitched Together by Context · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  33. Build An SLO Is an Error Budget You Spend on Purpose · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 75 min
  34. Build An Incident Is a Timeline, a Severity and Roles · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 75 min
  35. Build Chaos Engineering Is an Experiment With a Hypothesis · Phase 10 Observability & SRE · 90 min
  36. Build DORA Metrics Are Joins Over Deploys, Commits and Incidents · Phase 12 Platform Engineering · 75 min
  37. Build An MCP Server for kubectl: Tools Are Functions With a Schema · Phase 14 AIOps & Agentic Ops · 90 min
  38. Build An Incident-Triage Agent: The Loop Decides What the Model May Touch · Phase 14 AIOps & Agentic Ops · 120 min

Pair this with the SRE career page, the SRE learning path and SRE practices in the Reference layer.