DevOps-SRE PeopleCert Exam Lab Questions

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The primary difference between SRE and DevOps lies in their implementation focus and origins, though they share similar objectives. According to Google’s official SRE documentation:

“SRE can be seen as a specific implementation of DevOps with some idiosyncratic extensions.”

— Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter: What is Site Reliability Engineering?

While DevOps is a broad cultural and organizational philosophy aimed at closing the gap between development and operations through collaboration and automation, SRE provides a concrete, engineering-driven approach to achieving those goals — particularly through practices like error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, toil reduction, and incident response.

SRE focuses heavily on the post-production lifecycle — including reliability, monitoring, capacity planning, and incident response — whereas DevOps includes these concerns but emphasizes the entire software delivery lifecycle. Hence, Option A is the correct and most accurate answer.

Options B and C are incorrect:

B wrongly implies a division of roles (DevOps = developers, SRE = infrastructure), which is not how these frameworks operate.

C misrepresents SRE — it does not build silos but instead emphasizes shared responsibility and transparency in production systems.

D is incorrect because, while aligned, SRE and DevOps are not identical.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In a safety culture, SRE emphasizes psychological safety so engineers can work effectively in production without fear of blame. However, safety never removes accountability. Engineers must take responsibility for their actions, decisions, and assumptions, particularly during incidents.

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Postmortem Culture,” states:

“Blamelessness does not eliminate accountability. Individuals must still explain the context, assumptions, and reasoning behind their decisions so that the organization can learn.”

Google stresses that:

Engineers must feel safe to act and report issues

Engineers must remain responsible and accountable

Accountability enables learning, not punishment

Why other options are incorrect:

A Sharing incidents on social media violates confidentiality

C Blameless postmortems are required, not skipped

D Avoiding on-call is contrary to SRE responsibilities

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SLIs must measure user experience, and sometimes server-side metrics alone do not show the full picture. Client-side data may reveal issues such as:

Slow networks

Browser rendering delays

Mobile device limitations

CDN performance issues

Last-mile latency

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Indicators,” states:

“Server-side metrics do not always fully capture the user experience. In many cases, client-side measurements are required to understand the actual reliability delivered to users.”

The SRE Workbook reinforces:

“Some SLIs require client instrumentation because user-visible performance problems may not be observable from backend systems alone.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

B SLA negotiation has nothing to do with SLI selection.

C Automation engineering is unrelated to client-side measurement needs.

D Achievability of SLOs does not determine whether client-side data is needed; accuracy of user-experience measurement does.

Thus, the correct answer is A.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Burning the error budget to zero — strategically, not accidentally — helps ensure the correct balance between release velocity and system stability, which is the fundamental purpose of error budgets. Error budgets exist to encourage a healthy level of risk-taking up to the point where user experience is not impacted.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, SLO chapter:

“Error budgets provide a mechanism for balancing innovation and reliability by allowing measured risk-taking while ensuring user expectations are met.”

The SRE Workbook adds:

“Teams should aim to use their full error budget. Not using it implies missed opportunities to deliver features or improvements.”

This means that strategically burning the error budget to zero ensures:

Teams are shipping value at maximum safe velocity

Reliability goals are still respected

Risk is managed and intentional

Why other options are incorrect:

B Capacity measurement is unrelated to error budget consumption.

C Error budgets should not be continually revised unless business needs change.

D Conversations with partners may occur, but this is not the primary benefit.

Thus, the correct answer is A.