PeopleCert DevOps-SRE - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation v1.2

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Modern SRE-aligned organizations use small, cross-functional product teams capable of owning design, development, testing, and operational reliability. The SRE Book emphasizes: “Effective service ownership arises from small, autonomous teams with diverse skillsets and strong collaboration habits.” These teams share responsibility, encourage feedback, and maintain open communication to meet reliability goals.

Option A correctly identifies the two positive characteristics:

Small and collaborative

Cross-functional skillsets

Options 3 and 4 represent dysfunctional behaviors—SRE literature explicitly discourages responsibility silos and discouraging feedback, as these reduce reliability and slow incident learning.

Thus, A is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE Workbook describes an Error Budget Policy as a formal decision-making framework that defines what actions to take when a service consumes its error budget. Specifically, Google writes: “An error budget policy establishes when and how teams must intervene, whether to pause releases, prioritize reliability work, or adjust processes.” (SRE Workbook – Error Budget Policies). The purpose is to create predictable responses to reliability degradation—not simply alerting, innovation boosting, or bug prevention.

Option C best matches the definition: deciding when and how to intervene based on error budget burn.

Option A is only an alerting rule, not a policy.

Option B is an outcome of a healthy budget, not the policy’s purpose.

Option D is too narrow and is not how error budgets are framed.

Thus, C is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In SRE incident management, Google defines several formal roles during a major incident, including Incident Commander (IC), Communications Lead, Operations/Responder, and Planning Specialist. According to the SRE Workbook: “The Planning Lead is responsible for maintaining the source-of-truth incident state document, tracking action items, and ensuring the IC has the current situation overview.” (SRE Workbook – Chapter: Incident Management). This document contains timelines, changes, decisions, diagnostics, and action items—all crucial for reducing cognitive load during high-stress situations.

Option C—Planning Specialist—is therefore correct.

Option A (Logistics Specialist) is not defined as a core SRE incident role.

Option B (Communications Lead) manages outward communication, not the live incident log.

Option D (Incident Commander) leads the incident but delegates documentation to the planning role.

Hence, option C is the only answer that aligns with SRE’s defined responsibilities.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) is described in Google's SRE literature as an extension of SRE practices outward to customers who run workloads on cloud platforms. The SRE Book and the SRE Workbook state: “CRE is the practice of sharing SRE principles with customers, working closely with their operations teams, and establishing shared responsibility for reliability.” (SRE Workbook – Chapter: Customer Reliability Engineering). A CRE team collaborates directly with customer engineering and operations teams to identify reliability risks, review architectures, and co-manage SLOs, but does not redesign cloud services or build new features.

Option D matches the exact intention: CRE integrates with the customer’s operations team to share reliability responsibilities, applying SRE methods to customer systems and ensuring both customer and provider work jointly on reliability goals.

Option A is incorrect—CRE does not redesign cloud services.

Option B misinterprets CRE as improving the provider’s internal systems.

Option C incorrectly focuses on feature shipping; CRE is about reliability guidance, not feature delivery.

Thus, D is the correct and SRE-authentic answer.