Q1
Walk me through how you would design a monitoring and alerting strategy for a microservices application running on Kubernetes in production. What metrics would you prioritize, and what tools have you used?
Why they ask this:* SREs must understand observability fundamentals, cloud-native architecture, and the ability to design systems that catch failures before they impact users. This reveals depth in Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stacks, and alerting best practices.
Q2
Describe your experience with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform or CloudFormation. How have you used them to manage cloud resources, and what challenges did you encounter with state management or drift detection?
Why they ask this:* Cloud SREs must automate infrastructure provisioning and management. This tests practical experience with IaC, version control for infrastructure, and understanding of reproducible deployments.
Q3
Explain how you would troubleshoot a sudden spike in application latency in a distributed system. Walk me through your debugging methodology and what observability tools you'd leverage.
Why they ask this:* This assesses root-cause analysis skills, understanding of distributed tracing (Jaeger, Zipkin), log aggregation, and the ability to work systematically under pressure—core SRE competencies.
Q4
What is your experience with incident management and post-incident reviews? Describe how you've implemented or improved runbooks, playbooks, or automated remediation for common incidents.