Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

When a team exceeds its error budget, SRE practice requires applying error budget policies that restrict feature releases and shift focus toward reliability improvement. The idea is to prevent further degradation of user experience and ensure the service meets the agreed reliability targets.

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

“If the service exceeds its error budget, all new feature launches or risky changes are halted until reliability returns to acceptable levels. Engineering work should be directed toward addressing the causes of the budget overrun.”

This aligns with option A, which describes a reliability-focused response during sprint planning. Limiting sprint planning to post-mortem action items and reliability improvements is a direct application of error budget policies.

Additional guidance from the SRE Workbook:

“Error budget burn should directly influence decision-making. When the budget is exhausted, the team must focus on remediation work rather than new features.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

B Reviewing the error budget’s realism can be done periodically, but it is not the immediate consequence of a breach.

C Extending the error budget invalidates its purpose and is discouraged.

D Ignoring the error budget contradicts the entire SRE model and Google’s official guidance.

Therefore, A is the only correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Known workarounds represent toil that has no enduring value, one of the key characteristics of toil defined by the SRE framework.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:

“Toil is work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, has no enduring value, and scales linearly with service size.”

Known workarounds fit this definition because:

They solve the same recurring problems repeatedly

They do not permanently fix the underlying issue

They consume engineer time without contributing long-term improvements

These activities lack enduring value and should be eliminated through automation or engineering fixes.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Linear scaling — Many forms of toil scale linearly, but this does not specifically describe workarounds.

B. Tactical — Tactical means short-term, but not all tactical work is a workaround.

C. Automatable — While some workarounds can be automated, not all are.

D. No enduring value — This is the defining trait of workaround-type toil.

Therefore, option D is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

One of the central goals of SRE is that operational work must scale sublinearly with service growth. The SRE Book states: “If operational load grows linearly with service size, the model is unsustainable. Eliminating toil is key to scaling operations.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Eliminating Toil). Toil prevents scaling because it is manual, repetitive, and tied directly to human effort.

Option C is the only answer that reflects this principle: reducing or eliminating toil enables SRE teams to support growing applications without increasing human labor proportionally.

Option A (staffing levels) does not scale sustainably.

Option B (interruptions) relate to productivity but not true scalability.

Option D (on-call rotations) affects fatigue, not the scaling of operational work.

Thus, C is the correct and SRE-authentic answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A Network Reliability Engineer (NRE) is a specialized reliability role focused on applying SRE practices to networking. They use software engineering, SDLC concepts, and automation to manage networks at scale, including SDNs.

Google describes NRE as:

“Network Reliability Engineering applies SRE principles to network management, treating network configuration as code and automating changes safely.”

— Google Reliability Engineering Guidance

Responsibilities include:

Codifying SDN configurations

Automating network deployment

Testing network changes through CI/CD

Reducing network-related outages

Thus, the correct answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The Westrum Organizational Culture Model categorizes organizations based on how effectively they allow information to flow, particularly in high-risk and high-performance environments. This model is widely referenced in SRE and DevOps practices and is cited by Google in their SRE culture guidance.

The Westrum model identifies three culture types:

Pathological (power-oriented)

Bureaucratic (rule-oriented)

Generative (performance-oriented)

From the SRE Workbook and Google’s DevOps Research (DORA):

“The Westrum model is a taxonomy of organizational cultures based on how information flows. Generative cultures—with high cooperation and open information flow—correlate with higher reliability and better outcomes.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Deployment frequency is a DORA metric, not Westrum’s focus.

C Resource flow is unrelated to Westrum.

D While communication affects design, Westrum specifically studies information flow as a cultural health indicator, not structural design.

Thus, the correct answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

One of SRE’s strengths is using software engineering and automation to reduce manual, process-heavy work. This aligns perfectly with ITSM goals around repeatability, compliance, and quality.

The SRE Workbook, section “SRE and ITIL Integration,” explains:

“SRE can complement ITSM by applying automation and engineering practices to reduce manual process load, increase consistency, and meet compliance requirements.”

Examples include:

Automating change processes

Automating incident response flows

Improving configuration consistency

Reducing ticket-driven toil through engineering

Why the other options are incorrect:

A CAB approvals are not governed by error budgets

C Ticket acceleration is not the goal of SRE

D Engineering CMDBs is not the primary mechanism for ITSM alignment

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE defines capacity planning as the discipline of ensuring that a system has enough resources to meet expected demand, both now and in the future. The SRE Book states: “Capacity planning ensures that services have sufficient resources available to meet reliability and performance targets, accounting for growth, trends, and forecasted usage.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Capacity Planning). This involves forecasting workloads, analyzing trends, and creating plans to scale infrastructure so that service-level objectives can continue to be met.

Option C correctly describes capacity planning as creating a resource management plan to meet demand.

Option A refers to capacity monitoring, not planning.

Option B reflects generic resource management or cloud provider operations, not SRE capacity planning.

Option D refers to determining maximum capacity, which is a measurement activity—not full planning.

Thus, C is the correct SRE-aligned answer.