Domain 6 of 6 · Chapter 2 of 3

Operational Excellence & Reliability

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Included in this chapter:

  • Designing for reliability: HA and DR
  • The reliability vocabulary: SLI, SLO, SLA, error budgets, SRE
  • Google Cloud Customer Care tiers and the life of a case
  • Exam-pattern recognition

Google Cloud Customer Care tiers

DimensionBasicStandardEnhancedPremium
CostFree, included with every accountPaidPaidPaid (highest)
Technical case supportNone (billing/community only)Unlimited 1:1Unlimited 1:1Unlimited 1:1
Support hoursN/ABusiness hours, Mon-Fri24/724/7
Critical-case (P1) responseN/ANot covered (P2: 4 hours)Within 1 hourWithin 15 minutes
Technical Account ManagerNoNoOptional add-onAssigned
Best fitHobby / non-productionSmall productionMedium-large productionMission-critical

Decision tree

Need 1:1 technical support?(beyond docs and billing)NoBasicfree, docs and billing onlyYesNeed 24/7 coverage?NoStandardbusiness hours, P2 in 4 hoursYesNeed fastest P1 responseplus a dedicated TAM?NoEnhanced24/7, P1 first response in 1 hourYesPremium24/7, P1 in 15 min, assigned TAM
Cheat sheet

Cheat sheet

  • Reliability is consistent intended service; resilience is what survives failure
  • Build for failure with redundancy, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation
  • HA keeps you running through routine failures; DR recovers you from a disaster
  • RTO is tolerable downtime; RPO is tolerable data loss
  • An SLI is the measurement of one aspect of service
  • An SLO is the target you set for an SLI
  • An SLA is an SLO with a contractual consequence
  • SLI measures, SLO targets, SLA contracts: in that chain
  • An error budget makes less-than-100% reliability the deliberate goal
  • Toil is manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with the service
  • SRE is Google's specific implementation of the broader DevOps philosophy
  • Customer Care has four tiers; Basic is free with every account
  • Standard is business-hours support; Enhanced and Premium are 24/7
  • Premium gives the fastest P1 response and a dedicated TAM
  • Case priority P1 to P4 reflects business impact, not personal urgency
  • Modernizing operations means automation and observability replace manual toil
  • Serverless platforms auto-scale and can scale to zero when idle
  • Error Reporting automatically groups errors by root cause across services

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Also tested in

References

  1. https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/reliability
  2. https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/reliability/principles
  3. https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/dr-scenarios-planning-guide
  4. https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/
  5. https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/reliability/define-goals
  6. https://sre.google/sre-book/introduction/
  7. https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
  8. https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/overview
  9. https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/standard
  10. https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/enhanced
  11. https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/premium
  12. https://docs.cloud.google.com/support/docs/customer-care-procedures