13 articles tagged with Incident Response.
SRE interviews test numbers and judgment. Fifteen questions on SLIs, error budgets, incident command, toil, capacity, on-call and postmortems, plus a systems-design scenario, each with the answer that scores and the one that loses the room.
On October 20, 2026, europe-west2-b lost power when its generators never started. Cross-zone control-plane timeouts then degraded the whole London region. What happened and the gcloud audit to run now.
An unauthenticated regex-compiler RCE reaching back to GitLab 7.0, no workaround, and backports on older branches that fix only the critical bug. The exact version per branch and the commands to get there.
A scary number on the AWS bill is an incident, not a finance question. What to check in the first ten minutes, how to find the line item with two CLI queries, and when to stop the bleeding before you understand it.
A single Availability Zone in AWS's Spain region degraded for roughly 2.5 hours, and most "multi-AZ" architectures would have failed anyway.
A slow database made a backend service look dead, and the health check that was supposed to protect it killed it faster. The lesson has nothing to do with AI.
A background cleanup job saturated a shared database behind GitHub, and the safeguard pacing it watched only replica lag. Throttle on more than one signal.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok degraded together, with Azure East US the widely reported cause. Gemini stayed up. Multi-provider failover fails when providers share a substrate.
Both page the right person at 3am and both integrate with everything. The real differences show up in pricing structure, workflow depth, and who already owns the ecosystem around you.
Static keys leak. The question isn't if but how fast you notice and how clean your response runbook is when the pager goes off.
When strong engineers quit citing on-call, the fix is rarely a bigger stipend. Saner rotations, runbooks that help at 3am, and escalation that doesn't punish asking for help.
Most post-mortems produce a document and no follow-through. A copy-paste blameless template, a filled-in example, the facilitation rules, and the action-item discipline that turn incidents into engineering improvements.
