InternshipTools and first-week setup
The tools a Site Reliability Engineering intern uses and how to set up your workspace in week one.
These are the main tools for Site Reliability Engineering tasks. You do not need all of them on day one; the Level 1 tasks tell you when to install each one.
- Linux
- Docker & Kubernetes
- Prometheus & Grafana
- OpenTelemetry
- k6 / Locust
- Terraform / Ansible
- Git & GitHub
Set up your workspace
- Create a free GitHub account if you do not have one, with a professional username, and set up your LinkedIn profile: every task is submitted with a LinkedIn post.
- Create one repository for the internship, for example site-reliability-engineering-sre-internship, with a README that says who you are and what the repo holds.
- Keep one folder per task, named with the task number and title, so mentors find your work quickly.
- Commit small changes every day with clear messages. Your daily work report uses these commits as proof.
- Never commit passwords, API keys or personal data. Put secrets in a .env file and add it to .gitignore.
Your first tasks
| Task | What to do |
|---|---|
| What SREs do | In a repo named sre-internship, explain SRE, uptime, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs and error budgets with a worked example for a college results website. |
| Linux for operations | On a Linux VM or WSL, practise top, ps, df, du, free, ss, journalctl and systemctl. Document what each one tells you with screenshots. |
| Run a service with systemd | Run a small web app as a systemd service that restarts on failure. Kill it and show that it comes back. |
| Nines of availability | Make a table of the downtime allowed per day, month and year for 99%, 99.9%, 99.95% and 99.99% and explain the cost of each extra nine. |