INDIVIDUAL LEARNERS

SCHOOL OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Site Reliability Engineer

Nanodegree Program Syllabus
Overview
The goal of this program is to equip software developers with the engineering and operational skills required to build
automation tools and responses that ensure designed solutions respond to non-functional requirements such as availability,
performance, security, and maintainability. The content will focus on both designing systems to automate response to issues
with software sites as well as how to respond to common on-call situations.

Learning Objectives

A graduate of this program will be able to:

• Use proactive and reactive SRE strategies (monitoring, postmortem, team building, etc.) to identify
reliability risks through evaluating systems and processes.

• Develop customer-centric SLOs (such as percentile targets for availability, latency, and correctness) and
set up corresponding monitoring and risk mitigation measures to ensure customer happiness.

• Create and deploy automated self-healing architectures and other technologies to make the environment
more maintainable.

• Design and implement organizational processes and culture that enhance product reliability, including
outage/postmortem review, quarterly state of production presentation, and production readiness review.

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Program information

Estimated Time Skill Level

4 months at 10hrs/week* Intermediate

Prerequisites

A well-prepared learner should be able to:

• Write basic functions in an object-oriented language (Python or Java), such as for loops, conditionals, control flow, Python
methods, Java methods, etc.

• Write basic shell scripts in Bash or Powershell, which could include for loops, conditionals, scripting, etc.

• Understand Linux command-line (bash/shell) and UNIX shell.

• Create simple SQL queries using SELECT, JOINS, GROUP BY functions.

• Exercise networking skills including knowledge of virtual networks, DNS, subnets, and basic network troubleshooting
techniques.

• Perform DevOps tasks, such as setting up monitoring, doing feature rollout, and troubleshooting production issues (ideally
for large systems).

• Work with Kubernetes and basic kubectl, such as kubectl apply, kubectl create, kubectl config.

Required Hardware/Software

There are no software and version requirements to complete this Nanodegree program. All coursework and projects can be
completed via Student Workspaces in the Udacity online classroom.

*The length of this program is an estimation of total hours the average student may take to complete all required
coursework, including lecture and project time. If you spend about 5-10 hours per week working through the program, you
should finish within the time provided. Actual hours may vary.

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 Course 1

Foundations of Observability
In this course learners will focus on what observability requires in terms of people and tools. To begin with, we will introduce
SRE, its roles and responsibilities, and how those differ from other teams (DevOps, SysAdmin, Development). Once learners
establish that, they will see how SRE helps an enterprise improve and discuss the costs associated with SRE. Learners will come
to know the types of members of the SRE team, then end with the tool set that an SRE team may use to be successful.

Course Project

Observing Cloud Resources

Learners will configure a monitoring software stack to college and display a variety of metrics for commonly
used cloud resources including VM scale sets, Kubernetes service, and VMs. Additionally, learners will
establish and configure rules for alerting and set parameters to be notified prior to the occurrence
of failures within the aforementioned cloud resources. Learners will also have the opportunity to test
and observe their own implementation of the monitoring software stack to apply and showcase SRE
methodologies and practices which can be transferred to real-world scenarios.

• Identify the formation of SRE in the industry.

Lesson 1 • Compare the SRE scope of work and functions vs. adjacent roles (DevOps, sys
admin, and developers).
SRE Roles & Responsibilities
• Explain core skills of SRE.

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 • Identify common SRE practices incident response playbooks.
Lesson 2
• Explore enterprise workflows that can use reliability engineering.
Improving Enterprise
• Perform cost-benefit analysis of impact of SRE best practice on identified
Workflows
enterprise workflow for improvement.

• Illustrate collaboration best practices with development team cross-functional

Lesson 3 collaboration.

• Define the SRE team.

SRE Teams
• Develop governance of SRE team work quality.

• Install Prometheus/Grafana: Understand the installation steps and

out-of-the-box configuration.

Lesson 4 • Create a dashboard for host metrics (latency, errors, resource utilization CPU/
RAM Disk I/O), observability dashboards, and site reliability metrics.
Monitoring System
Performance • Install and configure a synthetic monitoring solution.

• Create alerts for application (availability, latency) metrics, monitor an endpoint,

and trigger an alert if the endpoint is down.

Course 2

Planning for High Availability &

Incident Response
This course will cover monitoring, high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR), infrastructure as code, and database
recovery and availability. We start by defining SLOs and SLIs. We then take those SLOs and SLIs and translate them into
queries for Prometheus and graphs in Grafana. Next, we look at our infrastructure overview, improve it with HA principles, and
then craft a DR plan. We then take that plan and deploy it via Terraform to multiple AWS regions. We wrap up the content by
designing and deploying highly available databases to AWS via Terraform.

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 Course Project

Deploying HA Infrastructure
In this project, learners will design and deploy HA infrastructure through Terraform and deploy it to AWS.
They will start by defining SLOs and SLIs and create a dashboard in Grafana for those objectives. Next, they
will create a disaster recovery plan and define their high-availability infrastructure. Learners will take what
they build and form Terraform code to deploy the infrastructure to multiple AWS regions. Finally, they will
deploy replicated databases through Terraform code to AWS.

• Understand what SLI/SLOs are and how each relates to an SLA.

• Define customer-centric SLOs.

Lesson 1
• Establish a plan on how to obtain metrics for SLOs/SLIs.
SLOs & SLIs
• Create SLI/SLO dashboards in Grafana which display these metrics in a way
that can be consumed by non-technical personnel.

• Determine the purpose and needs of each IT asset.

• Define a plan to consolidate IT assets.

Lesson 2
• Create a plan to allow for high availability by selecting optimal server
IT Assets, Availability geography and communication.
& Disaster Recovery
• Create a disaster recovery plan based on a designed high-availability
environment.

Lesson 3 • Add existing assets into Terraform.

• Use Terraform to create identical IT assets in a different region/geography.

Create & Deploy HA &
DR Infrastructure Using • Given a scenario, test the recovery using the new infrastructure with high
Terraform availability.

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Lesson 4 • Explore log-shipping to a SQL DR instance.

• Use full geo-replication for SQL databases.

High Availability &
DR of Databases • Create automated backups for SQL databases.

Course 3

Self-Healing Architecture
Learn how to deploy microservices or cloud architecture that is resilient enough to withstand failures and predictable enough
to resolve issues via automation without human intervention. This framework is known as self-healing architecture. Begin
by learning some self-healing system design fundamentals such as single points of failure and three-tier architecture. Then
we will show some self-healing deployment strategies, implementation steps, and use cases. Finally, we’ll cover some cloud
automation that learners can use to increase the resiliency of systems, such as auto-scaling automation.

Course Project

Deployment Roulette
Play the role of an engineer at a growing consulting firm. Applications left by a departing team are in an
undocumented, unknown state. Identify failing applications and implement fixes to resolve the problems.
Create an architecture diagram that communicates the status of the cloud environment to improve the
onboarding of future developers.

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 • Identify single points of failure in system architecture and describe resolution
strategies.
Lesson 1
• Describe three-tier architecture benefits and drawbacks.
Design Self-Healing Systems
• Describe self-healing architecture automation strategies.
& Visualize Them with
Architecture Diagrams • Describe best-practice microservice design for self-healing architecture.

• Visualize self-healing system design by analyzing and creating diagrams.

Lesson 2 • Describe multiple deployment strategies and their benefits and drawbacks.

• Assess in which scenarios to use specific deployment strategies.

Implement Self-Healing
Deployment Strategies • Implement rolling, canary, and blue-green self-healing deployment strategies.

Lesson 3 • Describe cloud automation for scaling and failover.

• Automate microservices scaling.

Implement Scaling & Failover
Automation Strategies for • Automate virtual machines scaling.

High-Availability Applications • Automate microservice cluster scaling.

Course 4

Establishing a Culture of Reliability

This course is all about establishing a lasting culture focused on reliability. Learn how to develop processes and frameworks
that will drive their workplace towards putting reliability first. Learners will begin by working through the incident management
process and how to have effective on-calls. Following that, they will learn how to perform reliability reviews on various phases
of a system. Next, they will learn how to effectively manage system capacity without being wasteful. We will round out this
course with a lesson on how to reduce toil to free up time to focus on the work that matters.

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 Course Project

Plan, Reduce, Repeat

Participate in three mock scenarios one might encounter as an SRE. In the first scenario, utilize capacity
management skills and demonstrate how to maintain an as-built document. In the second scenario, utilize
on-call best practices and complete with a post-mortem. In the third scenario, develop a toil reduction plan
and perform some hands-on automation.

Lesson 1 • Understand and utilize incident management process.

• Exhibit on-call best practices to have balanced and effective on-calls.

Improving On-Call
Effectiveness • Effectively write blameless post-mortems.

• Explain how Zero Trust relates to infrastructure and networking.

• Design network resources to provide security borders.

Lesson 2
• Configure Azure Bastion.
Performing Reliability Reviews
• Configure Just-in-time.

• Configure Azure Firewall.

• Perform load test.

• Analyze capacity requirements.

Lesson 3
• Utilize tiered capacity to effectively manage capacity for present, future, and
Managing System Capacity emergency needs.

• Mitigate capacity risks by utilizing capacity management best practice.

• Identify and measure toil.

Lesson 4
• Employ common toil reduction strategies.
Toil Reduction
• Develop and execute a toil reduction plan.

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Meet your instructors.

Nathan Anderson, MBA

Global Cloud Architect

Nathan is a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt and has 10+ years of experience in IT in multiple
industries. He is also the Instructor for two other Udacity courses: Ensuring Quality Releases and
Azure Performance.

Travis Scotto
Site Reliability Engineer

Travis Scotto has worked in technology for 10 years. He has worked in various infrastructure roles:
virtualization, databases, and monitoring. As an SRE, he employs automation and monitoring daily.
He also has adjunct taught IT classes for 4.5 years.

Emmanuel Apau
CTO at Mechanicode.io

Emmanuel is cofounder of the Black Code Collective and DC’s Technical.ly RealLIST Engineer
award recipient. An AWS Certified DevSecOps specialist with 12 years of experience, he has
spent his career developing innovative solutions using DevSecOps and site reliability best
practices.

Sonny Sevin
Site Reliability Engineer

Sonny is an SRE with a varied background. He has dabbled in research at Lawrence Berkeley
National Labs before moving into site reliability engineering to have a more hands on role. He
has been published in several computing journals, as well as taught introductory programming
courses.

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Udacity’s learning
experience

Hands-on Projects Quizzes

Open-ended, experiential projects are designed Auto-graded quizzes strengthen comprehension.
to reflect actual workplace challenges. They aren’t Learners can return to lessons at any time during
just multiple choice questions or step-by-step the course to refresh concepts.
guides, but instead require critical thinking.

Knowledge Custom Study Plans

Find answers to your questions with Knowledge, Create a personalized study plan that fits your
our proprietary wiki. Search questions asked by individual needs. Utilize this plan to keep track of
other students, connect with technical mentors, movement toward your overall goal.
and discover how to solve the challenges that
you encounter.

Workspaces Progress Tracker

See your code in action. Check the output and Take advantage of milestone reminders to stay
quality of your code by running it on interactive on schedule and complete your program.
workspaces that are integrated into the platform.

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Our proven approach for building
job-ready digital skills.
Experienced Project Reviewers

Verify skills mastery.

• Personalized project feedback and critique includes line-by-line code review from
skilled practitioners with an average turnaround time of 1.1 hours.

• Project review cycle creates a feedback loop with multiple opportunities for
improvement—until the concept is mastered.

• Project reviewers leverage industry best practices and provide pro tips.

Technical Mentor Support

24/7 support unblocks learning.

• Learning accelerates as skilled mentors identify areas of achievement and potential
for growth.

• Unlimited access to mentors means help arrives when it’s needed most.

• 2 hr or less average question response time assures that skills development stays on track.

Personal Career Services

Empower job-readiness.
• Access to a Github portfolio review that can give you an edge by highlighting your
strengths, and demonstrating your value to employers.*

• Get help optimizing your LinkedIn and establishing your personal brand so your profile
ranks higher in searches by recruiters and hiring managers.

Mentor Network

Highly vetted for effectiveness.

• Mentors must complete a 5-step hiring process to join Udacity’s selective network.

• After passing an objective and situational assessment, mentors must demonstrate

communication and behavioral fit for a mentorship role.

• Mentors work across more than 30 different industries and often complete a Nanodegree
program themselves.

*Applies to select Nanodegree programs only.

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Learn more at
www.udacity.com/online-learning-for-individuals →

01.13.22 | V1.0