Site Reliability Engineering Internship
Keep production systems fast and available the way SRE teams do: SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, Prometheus and Grafana monitoring, alerting, incident response, postmortems, Kubernetes, load testing and automation.
What you'll work on
- Level 1: Foundations - What SREs do, Linux for operations, Run a service with systemd and more
- Level 2: Building real features - SLO-based alerts, Load testing, Kubernetes basics and more
- Level 3: Professional work and capstone - Incident game day, Blameless postmortem, Chaos experiment and more
Full syllabus: all 30 graded tasks
These are the actual tasks the internship portal assigns for this domain. You submit each one with proof (a GitHub link or document) and a mentor reviews it.
Level 1: Foundations (12 tasks)
- 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.
- Containerise an app. Write a Dockerfile for a small API, add a health-check endpoint and run it with Docker Compose together with a database.
- Metrics with Prometheus. Run Prometheus and node_exporter with Docker Compose and query CPU, memory and disk metrics using PromQL.
- Grafana dashboard. Build a Grafana dashboard showing the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) for your API.
- Instrument your app. Add a Prometheus client to your API to expose request count, error count and latency histograms.
- Uptime monitoring. Set up a free uptime checker (Uptime Kuma or a free hosted service) for your app and show an alert when it goes down.
- Structured logs. Change your app to write JSON logs with request ID, path, status and duration, and search them with grep or jq.
- Write a runbook. Write a runbook for 'API is returning 500 errors': checks to run, likely causes, commands and when to escalate.
- Define SLOs. Choose SLIs and set SLOs for your API (for example 99.5% of requests succeed and 95% finish under 300 ms) and justify the numbers.
Level 2: Building real features (10 tasks)
- SLO-based alerts. Write Prometheus alert rules for your SLOs, including a burn-rate alert, and route them to email or a chat webhook with Alertmanager.
- Load testing. Load test your API with k6 or Locust. Find the request rate where latency or errors break the SLO and record the bottleneck.
- Kubernetes basics. Deploy your API to a local Kubernetes cluster (kind, minikube or k3d) with a Deployment, Service and ConfigMap.
- Probes and self-healing. Add liveness and readiness probes, then make the app hang. Show Kubernetes restarting it and removing it from traffic.
- Autoscaling. Add a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and show the pod count growing during a load test and shrinking afterwards.
- Distributed tracing. Add OpenTelemetry tracing to two services that call each other and view a request's full trace in Jaeger or Grafana Tempo.
- Safe releases. Do a rolling update with a bad version, catch the failure with probes and roll back. Write the commands and timeline.
- Retries and timeouts. Make one service call a slow dependency. Add timeouts, retries with backoff and jitter, and a circuit breaker, and show the effect on errors.
- Infrastructure as code. Create your monitoring stack or a cloud VM with Terraform or Ansible. Show plan and apply output and keep the code in Git.
- Backup and restore drill. Back up your database on a schedule, delete data on purpose and restore it. Record your RPO and RTO.
Level 3: Professional work and capstone (8 tasks)
- Incident game day. Inject 3 failures (database down, disk full, bad config) and respond to each as if live. Keep a timeline and measure time to detect and to recover.
- Blameless postmortem. Write a full postmortem for one game-day incident: impact, timeline, root cause, what went well and action items with owners.
- Chaos experiment. Use a chaos tool (Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos or a simple script) to kill pods or add network delay, and prove your system degrades gracefully.
- Toil automation. Find one repeated manual task in your setup (log cleanup, certificate renewal, restarts) and automate it with a script or cron job. Estimate the time saved.
- Capacity plan. Using your load-test results, write a capacity plan for 10 times today's traffic: servers, database, cost and when to scale.
- On-call handbook. Write an on-call guide: rota, escalation, alert severity levels, handover notes and rules that keep on-call healthy.
- Reliability review. Review an open-source app or your own project for single points of failure, missing alerts and risky deploys, and list fixes by priority.
- Capstone: reliable service. Run a small production-like service with SLOs, dashboards, alerts, runbooks, safe deploys and a tested backup. Submit the repo, screenshots and a 2-minute video tour.
Real software work, not just training
Every Site Reliability Engineering task is reviewed by our team and saved to your portfolio. Interns who pass the readiness check can take real work from Training Trains, W3AppDevelopers and DomainHostly projects on the Company Work board.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need experience to join the Site Reliability Engineering internship?+
Basic Linux commands and any one programming language help. Everything runs on your laptop or free tiers.
What will I do in the Site Reliability Engineering internship?+
You complete 30 graded tasks in three levels: foundations, real features, and professional work. Each task is submitted with GitHub or document proof and reviewed. The final capstone is: Capstone: reliable service.
Do I get a certificate for the Site Reliability Engineering internship?+
Yes. After your required tasks are approved, your attendance is above 75% and you pass the proctored final exam, you get a graded completion certificate that anyone can verify at trainingtrains.com/verify.
Can I do the Site Reliability Engineering internship online?+
Yes. You can do it fully online from home, or offline at our Erode and Perundurai branches. Tasks, quizzes and mentor reviews are the same in both modes.
Available both online (work from home) and offline at our Erode and Perundurai branches - see the full internship program details for departments, duration, and the application process.