DevOps-SRE Premium Exam Questions

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE Book clearly states: “A target of 100% availability is neither realistic nor economically viable at scale.” Complex distributed systems inherently experience failures, network issues, hardware faults, and dependency outages. SRE emphasizes embracing this reality through error budgets, which assume some failure and allow engineering resources to be used efficiently.

The primary reason not to set 100% availability is that it is impossible to achieve reliably and leads to wasted engineering effort. SRE states: “Chasing perfect reliability leads to dramatically increasing costs with diminishing returns.”

Option A captures this rationale precisely.

Options B, C, and D are secondary or incorrect interpretations and do not come directly from SRE principles.

Thus, A is the correct SRE-aligned answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Fixed error budgets are preferred in SRE because they encourage smaller, safer, and more predictable releases, which inherently reduces risk. A fixed budget forces the team to consistently evaluate how much reliability they can afford to trade for delivery speed each month or quarter.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives”:

“Error budgets allow teams to make controlled decisions about the risk they take on. A fixed budget naturally encourages teams to release in smaller batches, which reduces the overall risk and impact of a failure.”

Similarly, the SRE Workbook states:

“When teams work within a fixed error budget, they tend to push changes in smaller increments to avoid burning the budget too quickly.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Fixed budgets reduce toil by reducing firefighting, not increase it.

C Fixed budgets can be exceeded; this is not a reason they are beneficial.

D Error budgets do not predict outages; they measure tolerated unreliability.

Thus, the correct and SRE-supported answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Simplicity is a core SRE design principle. Google states: “Small, frequent, automated changes reduce risk and improve system stability.” (SRE Book – Release Engineering). Automating continuous, small deployments creates a simple and repeatable pipeline that increases agility while maintaining reliability. This approach aligns with both DevOps and SRE practices: reducing deployment complexity, lowering blast radius, and supporting rapid iteration.

Option B best reflects this philosophy: automated, continuous small deployments provide simplicity, stability, and agility simultaneously.

Option A improves process clarity but does not directly affect agility.

Option C is beneficial but broader and not specific to simplicity.

Option D focuses on control rather than agility.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE emphasizes decision-making based on measured data, not intuition. The SRE Book explains: “Monitoring and SLOs provide an objective basis for decision-making, replacing guesswork with quantifiable data.” (SRE Book – SLOs & Monitoring). Data enables SRE teams to understand system behavior, validate assumptions, detect anomalies, and prioritize engineering work. The primary benefit is not merely collecting data, but analyzing and interpreting it to support decisions grounded in facts rather than opinion.

Option A accurately reflects this principle: data analysis and interpretation enable fact-based decisions, which is the core justification for SRE’s reliance on SLIs and observability signals.

Option B overstates by claiming data alone is always sufficient.

Option C refers to data mining, which is not a core SRE concept.

Option D is partially true but narrower than the SRE philosophy of data-driven operations.

Thus, A is the most accurate SRE-aligned answer.