Reliability engineering
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Designs services and operating practices around explicit reliability risks.
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Infrastructure and operations
Site Reliability Engineer
Applies software engineering to production reliability, scalable operations, and evidence-based service objectives.
Skill coverage
100%
Course coverage
100%
Skill coverage shows how much of the role's capability map already has a published course. Course coverage shows how much of the mapped course pipeline for this role has shipped.
- Role skills
- 7
- Published coverage
- 7
- Relevant courses
- 43
Capability map
Skills
Importance describes how central each capability is to the role. Course coverage shows where you can build the skill in the current OpenSkills catalog.
Reliability engineering: 6 more courses
Incident management: 1 more course
Observability: 14 more courses
Production operations: 1 more course
Container orchestration: 1 more course
Site Reliability Engineer capability map
01
Reliability practice
3 capabilities
Service-level objectives
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Defines service indicators, objectives, and error-budget policies.
Course coverage
Incident management
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Coordinates detection, mitigation, communication, and learning during incidents.
02
Production systems
4 capabilities
Observability
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Uses telemetry to investigate system behavior and protect reliability.
Course coverage
- Observability FundamentalsFree
- Application Performance Monitoring
- Cloud Native Observability
- Distributed Tracing
- Fluentd
- Grafana Loki
- Jaeger
- Kubernetes Observability
- Logging FundamentalsFree
- Metrics Fundamentals
- ML Observability Tooling
- OpenTelemetry
- Prometheus Fundamentals
- Real User Monitoring
- Software Profiling
- Synthetic Monitoring
- eBPF Observability
Production operations
Importance: Essential (5 of 5)
Operates distributed services safely through change and failure.
Automation
Importance: Very important (4 of 5)
Eliminates repetitive operational work with maintainable software.
Course coverage
Container orchestration
Importance: Very important (4 of 5)
Diagnoses and operates orchestrated production workloads.
Learning path
Relevant courses
Core foundations
The concepts this role is built on.
Supporting knowledge
Adjacent knowledge that improves day-to-day judgment.
- Ansible Fundamentals
- Application Performance Monitoring
- Argo Rollouts
- Blameless Engineering Culture
- Business Continuity for IT
- Cloud Native Observability
- Disaster RecoveryFree
- Distributed Tracing
- Fluentd
- Grafana Loki
- Infrastructure Capacity Planning
- Infrastructure Operations Fundamentals
- Infrastructure Performance Engineering
- Introduction to SwampFree
- Jaeger
- Kubernetes FundamentalsFree
- Kubernetes Networking
- Kubernetes Observability
- Kubernetes Operations
- Kubernetes Scheduling
- Kubernetes Workloads
- Logging FundamentalsFree
- Metrics Fundamentals
- ML Incident Response and Alerting
- ML Observability Tooling
- OpenTelemetry
- Post-Incident Reviews
- Prometheus Fundamentals
- Real User Monitoring
- Resilience Engineering
- Software Profiling
- Synthetic Monitoring
- Systems TroubleshootingFree
Specializations
Deeper paths for particular environments or directions.
HOWTOs
Concrete operational procedures from the courses on this page.
- How to upgrade a production Kubernetes cluster one minor version
Moving a self-managed kubeadm cluster forward one Kubernetes minor version, including the version-skew rules and pre-flight checks that decide whether the upgrade can proceed at all.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to drain and replace a worker node safely
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Taking a worker node out of service for disruptive work or retirement without breaching any workload's availability guarantee, and returning it or removing it cleanly afterward.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to renew expiring kubeadm control-plane certificates
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Renewing the one-year kubeadm control-plane certificates before they expire, and the offline recovery path for a cluster whose certificates have already lapsed and whose API server is down.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to rebuild a Kubernetes control plane from an etcd snapshot
The last-resort recovery when etcd data is lost or corrupt beyond quorum: replacing entire cluster state from a snapshot, with the data-loss and reconciliation consequences that come with it.
Kubernetes Operations
- How to migrate deprecated Kubernetes API usage before an upgrade
verified on k8s-kubeadm-1-37-proxmox, amd64, 2026-10-28, sha256:9eb3a768197140c54046d712b1e7d28449c3696c4fe88ff7df6c0ed26b0b733b
Clearing an upgrade blocker by locating every client, manifest, and controller still calling a Kubernetes API version the next minor removes, and proving the usage is gone before the upgrade.
Kubernetes Operations
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