Incident Response and Reliability Engineering
Turn service objectives into alerts, investigate competing failure hypotheses and recover state safely. Finish with a timed incident and a reviewable follow-up plan.
Turn service objectives into alerts, investigate competing failure hypotheses and recover state safely. Finish with a timed incident and a reviewable follow-up plan.
Work through the modules in order. Each lesson ends with an exercise and a retrieval check; keep your answers before revealing the explanation. The final project brings the earlier decisions together in a design or incident record you can discuss aloud.
One introductory lesson is public, one lesson opens with free sign-in, and ten require Premium. Progress is a personal reading record. Self-checks and project rubrics do not award a professional certification. All numerical scenarios are teaching fixtures, not reported production results. Commands are read-only or run against local fixtures unless a lesson explicitly describes an optional sandbox.
Start with Safe Delivery: Infrastructure, Pipelines and Kubernetes if the prerequisites are unfamiliar.
Next course: Platform and AI Infrastructure: Capacity, Cost and Control.
When you finish, you can
- Design a multi-window alert policy with actionable ownership and recovery conditions, including what to do when telemetry is missing rather than healthy.
- Trace a 2026 OpenTelemetry export path and distinguish partial acceptance, retryable transport failures and permanent rejection without duplicating accepted batches.
- Review database failover as a writer-ownership change, distinguishing health detection from fencing and checking replication lag before promising data preservation.
- Resolve a staged incident evidence pack, calculate impact and capacity, and produce an action ledger, recovery check and two testable follow-ups.
BEFORE YOU START · Complete Safe Delivery or understand deployments, cloud failure domains and basic monitoring.
Syllabus
Measure user impact
Define a user-visible success indicator. Calculate budget burn with units attached. Choose alert windows that match the response.
Choose the next observation
Compare cohorts before restarting the fleet. Follow connection-pool exhaustion to its owner. Diagnose telemetry loss before trusting a clean chart.
Recover without losing evidence
Choose a mitigation with a stop condition. Rehearse a restore against RPO and RTO. Fence the old writer before promoting a new one.
Lead the incident
Run an incident handoff without losing decisions. Write follow-ups that close a failure path. Capstone: run a timed booking incident.