Week 1 — SRE Foundations: Reliability Measurement and Alerting #
| Day | Topic | Video | Article | English Practice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | What are SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets? | SLO vs SLI vs SLA vs Error Budget | Google SRE in Plain English — listen for the definitions | SRE Fundamentals: Differences Between SLI vs. SLO vs. SLA — core concepts | Define each term in one sentence using “measures,” “targets,” and “tolerates.” | |
| 02 | How do you measure what matters? | Understanding SLIs, SLOs, SLAs & Error Budgets — follow the measurement framework | SLOs: Stop Thinking in Burn Rates — how to track reliability | Explain burn rate in three sentences using “error budget” and “window.” | |
| 03 | What makes a good alert vs. noise? | Why Alert Fatigue is a Major Challenge in Observability — focus on the survey findings | How AI Can Help IT Teams Find the Signals in Alert Noise — reducing noise | Write five rules for actionable alerts using “must” and “in order to.” | |
| 04 | How does toil erode operational reliability? | Reducing Toil | Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation — follow the toil characteristics | 5 Non-AI Reasons Why You Still Have Toil — why toil persists | Describe two examples of toil using “repetitive,” “automatable,” and “no long-term value.” | |
| 05 | What is the relationship between SRE and DevOps? | SRE vs DevOps vs Platform Engineering — The Honest Difference — follow the role boundaries | 5 Ways to Build out an SRE Function and Why It Matters — building an SRE team | Compare SRE and DevOps using “whereas” and “on the other hand.” | |
| 06 | Review: define reliability targets for a service | Introduction to Site Reliability Engineering — replay without captions | What’s the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring? — verify your understanding | Give a two-minute explanation of SRE foundations; compare with Day 01. |
Week 2 — Incident Response, Postmortem, and Chaos Engineering #
| Day | Topic | Video | Article | English Practice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07 | How should an incident be detected and triaged? | Navigating SRE/Incident Management — follow the triage workflow | How We Manage Incident Response at Honeycomb — real-world process | Describe the triage steps in four ordered sentences using “detect,” “classify,” and “escalate.” | |
| 08 | What happens during an incident war room? | Automated Cloud-Native Incident Response with Kubernetes and Service Mesh — watch how the bridge is structured | Tips to Make Your On-Call Process Less Stressful — war room roles and communication | Write five rules for an effective war room using “must,” “in order to,” and “without delay.” | |
| 09 | How do you write a blameless postmortem? | Postmortem Culture at Google | Ramon Medrano Llamas — focus on the blameless principles | Top 12 Best Practices for Better Incident Management Postmortems — postmortem checklist | Summarize a postmortem structure in five sentences using “timeline,” “root cause,” and “action item.” | |
| 10 | What is chaos engineering and why practice failure? | Deep Dive into Chaos Mesh — follow the chaos experiment lifecycle | There Is No Resilience without Chaos — chaos engineering philosophy | Explain chaos engineering in three sentences using “hypothesis,” “blast radius,” and “steady state.” | |
| 11 | How do you build resilience with redundancy and fallbacks? | Kubernetes Workload Resiliency in Action: Beyond Basics — focus on the resiliency patterns | Chaos Engineering on CI/CD Pipelines — testing resilience in pipelines | Describe two resilience patterns using “circuit breaker,” “retry,” and “fail gracefully.” | |
| 12 | Review: run a tabletop incident exercise | Games We Play to Improve on Incident Response | Conf42 SRE 2021 — replay the exercise formats | Bringing Principles into the World of Incident Management — verify your exercise design | Give a two-minute walkthrough of a tabletop exercise; compare with Day 07. |
Week 3 — Autoscaling, Performance, and Capacity Planning #
| Day | Topic | Video | Article | English Practice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13 | How does horizontal pod autoscaling work? | Horizontal Pod Autoscaling | Kubernetes — follow the HPA scaling loop | Getting Started with Kubernetes Autoscaling — HPA fundamentals | Explain how HPA decides when to scale in four sentences using “threshold,” “metrics,” and “replicas.” | |
| 14 | What is the difference between HPA, VPA, and KEDA? | HPA vs. VPA vs. Keda vs. CA vs. Karpenter vs. Fargate — follow the comparison matrix | K8s Resource Management: An Autoscaling Cheat Sheet — compare all autoscalers | Compare HPA and VPA using “whereas” twice; then explain when KEDA is preferable in three sentences. | |
| 15 | How do resource requests and limits affect scheduling? | All You Need to Know in 12 Minutes: Pods’ Requests and Limits in Kubernetes — follow the scheduling impact | How Kubernetes Requests and Limits Really Work — scheduling deep dive | Describe how the scheduler uses requests in four ordered sentences using “allocatable,” “fits,” and “binds.” | |
| 16 | How do you profile and tune application performance? | Diagnosing Application Performance With EBPF, Pyroscope, and Kubernetes — watch the profiling workflow | Beyond Basic Scaling: Advanced Kubernetes Resource Strategies — advanced tuning | Write five sentences about continuous profiling using “flame graph,” “hot path,” and “in order to.” | |
| 17 | How do you plan capacity for a growing cluster? | Tutorial: Kubernetes Smart Scaling: Getting Started with Karpenter — follow the node provisioning model | Getting the Most from Kubernetes Autoscaling — capacity planning tips | Explain how Karpenter differs from Cluster Autoscaler using “provisioning,” “node pool,” and “whereas.” | |
| 18 | Review: design an autoscaling strategy for a web service | Kubernetes pod autoscaling for beginners — replay without captions | Kubernetes Autoscaling: Q&A With Fairwinds CTO Andy Suderman — verify your strategy | Give a two-minute explanation of an autoscaling strategy; compare with Day 13. |
Week 4 — Progressive Delivery and Platform Engineering #
| Day | Topic | Video | Article | English Practice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 | What is canary deployment and how does it reduce risk? | Progressive Delivery Made Easy With Argo Rollouts — follow the canary workflow | Progressive Delivery on OpenShift — canary and blue-green patterns | Explain canary deployment in four sentences using “traffic shifting,” “rollback,” and “risk.” | |
| 20 | How does Argo Rollouts automate progressive delivery? | 30 Days Of CNCF Projects | Day 9: What is Argo Rollouts + Demo — follow the demo steps | More Problems with GitOps — and How to Fix Them — Argo Rollouts in GitOps | Describe how Argo Rollouts integrates with analysis templates using five sentences and “in order to.” | |
| 21 | What is feature flagging and how does it decouple deploy from release? | Canary Deployments Are a Myth — True Progressive Delivery Occurs Via OpenFeature — follow the OpenFeature model | Feature Flags: Making Software Delivery Faster — feature flag fundamentals | Write five sentences about decoupling deploy from release using “feature flag,” “subset,” and “however.” | |
| 22 | What is an internal developer platform and who builds it? | Creating Paved Paths for Platform Engineers — Panel — focus on the platform team roles | How Platform Engineering Enables the 10000-Dev Workforce — platform at scale | Explain what a paved path is in three sentences using “self-service,” “golden path,” and “in order to.” | |
| 23 | How do you manage multi-cluster and multi-cloud reliability? | Seamless Multi-Cloud Kubernetes: A Practical Guide — follow the multi-cluster architecture | How Do the Internal Developer Platform and Portal Connect? — platform consistency | Compare single-cluster and multi-cluster reliability using “whereas” and “on the other hand.” | |
| 24 | Review: design a progressive delivery pipeline | ArgoCon | Argo Rollouts Update — Alexander Gaudreault — replay without captions | 7 Major Gaps in Today’s GitOps Tools — verify your pipeline design | Give a two-minute explanation of a progressive delivery pipeline; compare with Day 19. |
Week 5 — SRE at Scale: Cost, Culture, and Continuous Improvement #
| Day | Topic | Video | Article | English Practice | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | How do you allocate cloud costs to teams (FinOps)? | FinOps Summit: Cost Visibility and Optimization in Kubernetes — follow the cost allocation model | FinOps: How Kubernetes Teams Can Best Work with Finance — FinOps fundamentals | Explain how FinOps allocates costs in four sentences using “attribution,” “showback,” and “in order to.” | |
| 26 | What is an SRE culture and how does it differ from traditional ops? | How Google SRE and Developers Work Together | GOTO 2021 — follow the collaboration model | SRE vs. DevOps? Successful Platform Engineering Needs Both — culture comparison | Compare SRE culture with traditional ops using “whereas,” “blameless,” and “error budget.” | |
| 27 | How do you conduct a production readiness review? | Keynote: Beyond Operations: Scaling Platform Engineering in the CNCF Community — follow the platform maturity model | Kubernetes Isn’t Enough for a Production-Ready Platform — production readiness checklist | Write five sentences about production readiness using “observability,” “SLI,” and “in order to.” | |
| 28 | What are the key metrics for platform team health? | Starting and Scaling a Platform Engineering Team — follow the team growth stages | Limitations in Measuring Platform Engineering with DORA Metrics — metrics beyond DORA | Describe three platform health metrics using “adoption,” “developer satisfaction,” and “whereas.” | |
| 29 | How do you build a reliability-focused engineering culture? | Cloud Native SRE Practices in Financial Services — follow the real-world SRE adoption | What Platform Engineering Meant for Adidas’s SREs — SRE transformation story | Write 100 words about building reliability culture using “blameless,” “error budget,” and “continuous improvement.” | |
| 30 | Final presentation: your SRE toolkit for cloud native | Jonathan Bryce, The Linux Foundation — replay the cloud native vision | The Evolution of the Site Reliability Engineer — revisit the SRE journey | Give a three-minute presentation connecting Weeks 1–5; compare your clarity with Day 01. |
Weekly Self-Check #
After each sixth study day, record:
- Listening: Can I identify the main point and three supporting details without captions?
- Vocabulary: Can I use five useful phrases from this week in new sentences?
- Speaking: Can I explain the topic for two minutes using only a few keywords?
- Writing: Can I produce a short summary with a main point, an example, and a limitation?
- Next step: Which one difficulty should I focus on next week? Repeat a difficult week if needed; finishing on schedule is not a language-proficiency test.