What You’re Presumed to Know as an Engineer

Linux Administration: Comfortable managing Linux systems, including networking, file systems, permissions, process management, and security basics.
Scripting & Automation: Proficient in shell scripting (Bash) and at least one programming language like Python or Go for automating operational tasks.
Databases: Understanding of database fundamentals, including performance tuning and backup/recovery concepts, especially with relational databases like PostgreSQL.
Cloud Infrastructure Basics: Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), virtual machines, networks, and containerization concepts.
Software Development Fundamentals: Version control (e.g., Git), CI/CD pipelines, and release processes.

What to Master Next for SRE Excellence

Observability & Monitoring Tools

Gain hands-on skills with New Relic, LogicMonitor, Grafana, Kibana, Dynatrace, and Azure Monitor to build comprehensive monitoring dashboards, log aggregation, and alerting systems tailored to your apps

Learn to define and track SLIs and SLOs, and effectively use error budgets to balance reliability with velocity.

Incident Management & Alerting Workflows

Implement and integrate alerting solutions with platforms like PagerDuty and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams.
Develop solid workflows for incident detection, on-call management, rapid escalation, and transparent communication with stakeholders.
Conduct blameless postmortems and root cause analyses (both internal and external) that foster continuous reliability improvements.

Automation & Infrastructure as Code

Develop automation scripts for patching, releases, routine maintenance, and scaling tasks.
Master Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools to manage infrastructure declaratively and consistently across environments.

Cloud & Container Orchestration

Deepen understanding of cloud resource management (especially Azure if relevant), containerization using Docker, and orchestration with Kubernetes or similar platforms.
Build scalable, resilient architectures that can be monitored and maintained efficiently.