Capstone project for Site Reliability Engineering
Get checkout ready for the festival rush
Last festival, the Mangrove app's checkout failed for 40 minutes at the evening peak: immediate retries against a slow payment provider exhausted the order service's database connection pool, the first page came nine minutes after customers started failing, and twenty minutes went on theories before anyone looked at the retries. This year's festival is six weeks away and orders will peak at about four times normal. Prepare checkout for it. Use the system as described in the lessons (API gateway, order, payment and stock services, PostgreSQL, Redis, a job queue); you may build a small stand-in service to instrument and load test, or work from the numbers given in the lessons.
What you hand in
- An SLO document for placing and paying for an order: SLIs with exact good and valid events, targets, windows, the error budget and the error budget policy
- Dashboards and burn-rate alert rules (fast and slow burn, page and ticket) with a runbook link for each page
- A capacity plan for 4× peak from load-test results, with headroom, the first bottleneck and what will be pre-scaled
- A game-day plan and report: two failure scenarios, the steady-state hypothesis, abort conditions and what was found
- An incident playbook: severities, roles, the communication cadence and templates, and the postmortem template the team will use
Check your work
Tick each item when your project meets it. Be strict: this is the rubric the reviewer uses.
- SLIs measure what customers experience (successful, fast enough checkouts, counted as good events over valid events), not server health
- The error budget policy says what happens when the budget is spent, who decides, and how exceptions work
- Alerts page on budget burn with multi-window rules, are few, and each page is actionable with a runbook
- Capacity numbers come from load tests with a realistic mix, not guesses, and include headroom for losing a node or zone
- The game day has a hypothesis, a limited blast radius and abort conditions, and its findings become tracked actions
- The playbook names roles (incident commander, operations, communications, scribe), severities and an update cadence with templates
0 of 6 checked
Model answer
The model answer opens once your capstone passes the review, so you can compare your work with an outline of a strong submission.
Hand in your capstone
Your links are checked automatically, then the work is scored against the rubric above, item by item, with comments. A pass counts toward the course certificate and shows on your profile.
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