School of SRE

Early 2019, we started visiting campuses to recruit the brightest minds to ensure LinkedIn and all the services that it is composed of is always available for everyone. This function at Linkedin falls in the purview of the Site Reliability Engineering team and Site Reliability Engineers ( SRE ) who are Software Engineers who specialize in reliability. SREs apply the principles of computer science and engineering to the design and development of computer systems: generally, large distributed ones.

As we continued on this journey we started getting a lot of questions from these campuses on what exactly site engineering roll entails? and, how could someone learn the skills and the disciplines involved to become a successful site engineer? Fast forward a few months, and a few of these campus students had joined LinkedIn either as Interns or as full time engineers to become a part of the Site Engineering team, we also had a few lateral hires who joined our organization who were not from a traditional SRE background. That's when a few of us got together and started to think about how we can on board new new graduate engineers to the site engineering team.

There is a vast amount of resources scattered throughout the web on what are the roles and responsibilities of an SREs, how to monitor site health, handling incidents, maintain SLO/SLI etc. But there are very few resources out there guiding someone on what all basic skill sets one has to acquire as a beginner. Because of the lack of these resources we felt that individuals are having a tough time getting into open positions in the industry. We created School Of SRE as a starting point for anyone wanting to build their career in the role of SRE.

In this course we are focusing on building strong foundational skills. The course is structured in a way to provide more real life examples and how learning each of the topics can play a bigger role in your day to day SRE life. Currently we are covering the following topics under the School Of SRE:

• Linux basics
• Git
• Linux Networking
• Python and Web
• Relational databases (MySQL)
• NoSQL concepts
• Big Data
• Systems Design
• Security

We believe continuous learning will help in acquiring deeper knowledge and competencies in order to expand your skill sets, every module has added reference which could be a guide for further learning. Our hope is that by going through these modules we should be able build the essential skills required for a Site Reliability Engineer.

At Linkedin we are using this curriculum for onboarding our non-traditional hires and new college grads to the SRE role. We had multiple rounds of successful onboarding experience with the new members and helped them to be productive in a very short period of time. This motivated us to opensource these contents for helping other organisations onboarding new engineers to the role and individuals to get into the role. We realise that the initial content we created is just a starting point and our hope is that the community can help in the journey refining and extending the contents.