Free PeopleCert DevOps-SRE Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 2

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

High turnover in IT operations roles is often driven by a combination of factors, not just one. The Google SRE Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil,” outlines that excessive toil, unpredictable work, and overload contribute to burnout and churn:

“Excessive operational workload and interrupt-driven work lead to burnout and high attrition among engineering and operational staff.”

The SRE Workbook adds:

“Teams overwhelmed with toil struggle to innovate, automate, or develop new skills, creating frustration and increasing turnover.”

Each option listed represents a recognized driver of burnout in SRE and operations environments:

Overload and disruptive work patterns are known contributors to burnout.

Lack of time for skills development demotivates engineers and prevents career growth.

Backlog-driven cultures force teams into reactive rather than proactive work.

The combination of these factors matches common causes of attrition in operations teams. Therefore, all of the above is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Achieving high availability in SRE practice is driven by accurate measurement of what matters and fast detection and correction of issues. According to Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Book, measurement of critical user-facing signals is foundational: “SLIs must capture the aspects of the service that are most critical to users and must be measured with high accuracy.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Service Level Objectives). Without measuring the critical aspects of a service—latency, errors, availability, and quality—teams cannot make informed decisions or detect degradation effectively.

The SRE book also emphasizes reducing MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) and tightening the feedback loop between detection and correction. Google states: “Reducing the time between detection and mitigation is one of the most effective levers for improving availability.” (SRE Book – Chapters on Incident Response & Monitoring). Rapid identification and resolution directly improve a system’s availability and resilience.

Option D (1 and 4) is the only choice that correctly reflects SRE principles.

Measuring critical aspects → essential for correct SLO/SLI alignment

Maintaining a short interval between detection and correction → drives higher availability

Options including staff performance measurement or generic development relationships are not mentioned as availability-driving factors in the SRE literature.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE model heavily emphasizes cross-functional teamwork. In the SRE Workbook and chapters addressing incident management, Google defines collaboration as “bringing together individuals with diverse expertise to jointly solve problems and make decisions.” Collaboration implies active engagement, shared goals, and joint execution—exactly what the statement describes.

Option B, Collaboration, fits perfectly because effective problem-solving during incidents, launches, or reliability engineering work requires engineers from multiple disciplines (e.g., SRE, developers, network teams, product teams) to work together directly.

Option A (Coordination) is more about task alignment, not joint problem-solving.

Option C (Communication) is necessary but insufficient for solving problems together.

Option D (Cooperation) implies helpfulness, not necessarily integrated problem-solving.

Thus, B is the correct concept.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE and modern DevOps best practices require that build artifacts—such as binaries, container images, and deployment packages—be stored in a secure, versioned artifact repository. These repositories ensure integrity, traceability, immutability, and security of deployment packages.

While the SRE Book does not use the ITIL term DML, it emphasizes:

“All production binaries should be stored in a secure, versioned repository to ensure consistent, repeatable, and trustworthy deployments.”

— Site Reliability Engineering Book, section on Release Engineering

The SRE Workbook expands on this principle by emphasizing signed and verified artifacts:

“To ensure safe rollout, artifacts must be built once, stored securely, signed, versioned, and deployed from a controlled artifact repository.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A A CMS manages configuration, not deployment artifacts.

B Subversion is a source code repository, not an artifact repository.

C A DML is an ITIL concept, but SRE practice does not rely on it; instead, SRE uses modern artifact repositories (e.g., GCR, ACR, Artifactory).

Thus, the correct answer is D.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE Book provides a precise definition: “SLIs are the carefully defined quantitative measures of some aspect of the level of service provided. SLOs are the target values or ranges for these indicators.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Service Level Objectives). This establishes a clear hierarchical relationship: SLIs are the measurements, while SLOs define the acceptable target levels for those measurements.

Therefore, option A is correct: SLIs measure things like latency, availability, throughput, and error rate.

SLOs then define the goal such as “99.9% availability over 30 days.”

Option B reverses the relationship.

Option C incorrectly says SLOs measure SLIs, which is backwards.

Option D confuses metrics and targets.

Thus, A is the only choice that aligns with Google’s official SRE definitions.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In the context of SRE tooling and automation, configuration management platforms like Puppet support large-scale infrastructure reliability by enabling consistency, repeatability, and automation. Puppet’s Discovery capability allows engineers to automatically locate, identify, classify, and group cloud nodes or infrastructure resources. Although not directly from Google’s SRE Book, Discovery aligns with SRE principles of reducing toil and enabling scalable automation. SRE emphasizes “automating away the manual work of locating and managing infrastructure at scale.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Eliminating Toil). Puppet Discovery does precisely this by automatically scanning environments, detecting nodes, and providing metadata to group or manage them.

Option A (Provisioning) refers to creating infrastructure, not identifying it.

Option B (Delivery) relates to CI/CD processes.

Option D (Insight) relates to analytics and reporting, not node identification.

Therefore, C. Discovery is correct as it directly represents the capability described.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

One of SRE’s strengths is using software engineering and automation to reduce manual, process-heavy work. This aligns perfectly with ITSM goals around repeatability, compliance, and quality.

The SRE Workbook, section “SRE and ITIL Integration,” explains:

“SRE can complement ITSM by applying automation and engineering practices to reduce manual process load, increase consistency, and meet compliance requirements.”

Examples include:

Automating change processes

Automating incident response flows

Improving configuration consistency

Reducing ticket-driven toil through engineering

Why the other options are incorrect:

A CAB approvals are not governed by error budgets

C Ticket acceleration is not the goal of SRE

D Engineering CMDBs is not the primary mechanism for ITSM alignment

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A blameless post-mortem is a foundational SRE practice that encourages truthful, detailed reporting after an incident. The purpose is to learn, not punish. Google SRE emphasizes that engineers must feel psychologically safe to report what they did, what they assumed, and why they made those decisions.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Postmortem Culture”:

“Blameless postmortems encourage engineers to share the full details of their actions and assumptions without fear of punishment, enabling learning and preventing repeated failures.”

The book further states:

“Understanding the assumptions made during an incident is critical to uncovering systemic issues.”

Thus:

Engineers must report without fear of retribution

They must report assumptions and decisions made during the incident

Therefore, the correct answer is C. Both A and B.

Why the other options are insufficient:

A Only partially correct

B Only partially correct

D Testing data may be included, but it is not the defining feature of blameless postmortems

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

An error budget accounts for all downtime, including both planned and unplanned outages. This is a critical SRE principle: the user does not distinguish between maintenance downtime and accidental downtime — therefore, neither should the SLO nor the error budget.

The SRE Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives,” states:

“From the user’s perspective, availability is simply whether the service is working or not, regardless of whether the outage was planned or unplanned.”

This means all downtime counts toward the error budget.

Additionally, the SRE Workbook reinforces this point:

“Error budgets must include every form of unavailability — maintenance events, configuration changes, emergency work, and unexpected incidents.”

This confirms that planned outages (maintenance windows) and unplanned outages (incidents) both consume error budget.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Only includes unplanned incidents; SRE requires counting planned outages as well.

B Defect fixes may contribute to downtime, but “defect fixes” alone are not a downtime category.

D CAB approval has no bearing on whether outages count toward error budgets.

Thus, C is correct: any planned or unplanned outage must be included.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Defense-in-Depth (DiD) is a layered security strategy referenced in SRE’s discussions of secure infrastructure and resilience. The perimeter layer is responsible for controlling and monitoring traffic flowing into and out of the network from external sources, such as the public Internet. This includes firewalls, intrusion detection systems, load balancers, and boundary network controls.

While SRE focuses primarily on reliability, the SRE Book stresses the importance of resilient system boundaries: “Perimeter protections are critical where external traffic enters the system.” (SRE Book – Security and Infrastructure considerations).

Option C correctly identifies the Perimeter Layer as the network boundary where data flows in/out from other networks—including the Internet.

Option A (Host layer) secures individual machines.

Option B (Physical layer) refers to hardware, power, racks, etc.

Option D (Data layer) protects stored data, not ingress/egress traffic.

Thus, C is correct.