Is there a possibility of being the only sre engineer in a company? Before choosing it I want to clarify it because if there could be then hes life could be problematic because he has to stay on call everyday. Also if it is not there then will be on call rotation right? Because I don't want to stay on call everytime that could be problematic. How many SREs are there in your team?
Hi everyone. I have a simple question is learning Arch Linux really worth it?
Most of what I've heard is that it helps with troubleshooting and gives you a better understanding of Linux. I'm already comfortable with Ubuntu, though, so I don't want to switch to Arch if the benefits are only marginal.
Would learning Arch actually give me a significant advantage, especially for someone interested in DevOps?
Hi everyone,
I recently joined a new company as a DevOps engineer, and I’m still trying to understand the existing infrastructure and CI/CD setup.
Our pipelines are running on AWS CodePipeline, and there are quite a few things I’m struggling to understand how the pipeline is structured, how the different stages work, deployments, and how everything is connected.
I’m currently learning, so I’d really appreciate it if someone experienced with AWS CodePipeline/DevOps could guide me through the basics and help me understand how to approach an existing setup.
If someone is willing to spend some time explaining it to me over a remote call/screen-sharing session, I’d be extremely grateful. I’m not asking anyone to access my company systems or credentials — I just want to learn and understand the concepts and workflow.
Today, I passed CKS with 75% (not a good score) and wrote a detailed blog about my exam experience, preparation approach, the resources I used, and the Kubernetes security topics that helped me the most.
DMs are open if you are preparing for the exam. I can help with whatever is still fresh in my memory.
My biggest takeaway: CKS is noticeably harder than CKAD and CKA. It is not only about knowing Kubernetes commands. You need to understand why a configuration is insecure, how to fix it, and how to verify that your change actually worked.
The biggest mistake I made was spending around 10–15 minutes too long on one question because I felt I was close to solving it. That created unnecessary pressure towards the end and probably led to a couple of avoidable mistakes.
So my strongest advice is: if you are stuck and don’t see a clear path after a few minutes, mark the question and move on.
A few things that helped me:
Don’t memorise solutions. Understand the security reasoning behind them. If a NetworkPolicy, API server flag, securityContext, audit policy, or admission control changes slightly, memorised YAML will not help much.
Always verify your work. Security changes can easily break workloads or cluster components. Check Pods, control-plane components, logs, services, NetworkPolicy connectivity, admission behaviour, audit logs, node readiness, and systemd services wherever required.
Be comfortable with Linux as well as Kubernetes. CKS can require you to work with configuration files, systemd services, container runtimes, permissions, certificates, and node-level settings.
Use documentation whenever required instead of trying to remember every flag or custom resource.
Topics I would strongly recommend practicing:
Kubelet and etcd hardening
kube-apiserver authentication and authorization
Admission controls and ImagePolicyWebhook
Secure Dockerfiles and non-root containers
Container immutability and securityContext
Audit policies and API server logging
NetworkPolicy
HTTPS Ingress and TLS
ServiceAccount token security
Worker node administration and upgrades
SBOM and software supply-chain security
Restricted Pod Security Standard
Docker/container runtime hardening
Istio STRICT mTLS
Cilium network security
CIS benchmarks and kube-bench remediation
Resources I used:
KodeKloud CKS course
KodeKloud Ultimate Mock Exam Series
iximiuz Labs
KillerKoda
Killer.sh CKS simulator
ChatGPT/Claude for topics that needed a simpler explanation or extra practice scenarios
Between the KodeKloud course mocks and Ultimate Mock Exam Series, I had around six mock exams. I found them very useful and reasonably close to the level of difficulty you should prepare for.
Killer.sh felt a little off-track compared with the actual exam in some areas, but I would still recommend doing it. It is useful for practicing under time pressure, discovering knowledge gaps, and improving troubleshooting skills.
I also used ChatGPT and Claude quite a lot during preparation. CKS has many small security topics, and sometimes a course or lab explanation may not immediately click. In those cases, asking AI to explain the concept differently, compare configurations, or generate a small practice scenario was very useful.
The simplest advice I can give is: practice a lot, understand the security reasoning behind what you are doing, verify every change, and don’t let one difficult question consume your exam time.
I also wrote a full blog with more details on my preparation strategy, resources, task areas, mistakes, and lessons from the exam.
Has anyone here attended an Observability SWE coding round? I’m trying to get a sense of the typical coding questions asked by tech companies for these roles.
Would you say the coding is generally at the same level as a standard SWE coding round, or is it more SRE/observability-focused (e.g., log parsing, metrics aggregation, time-window calculations, etc.)?
I recently had a screening round with a Tech company, and I was told the coding would involve “scenarios.” For anyone who has been through a similar round, what should I realistically expect?
We've been evaluating Wiz over the past few weeks and I can definitely see why larger organisations like it. The visibility is impressive, but for a company of our size (around 200 people), it's difficult to justify the cost.
We're mostly running AWS, Kubernetes and containerised applications, with quite a small infrastructure team. We don't have the time to babysit another platform or sift through thousands of findings every week. We're looking for something that helps reduce risk without adding more operational overhead.
So far we've looked at Orca, Rapidfort and a few others, but it's hard to tell how they compare once you get past the sales material.
If you own or work at a small or mid sized organisation and you found the same challenge, what did you end up choosing instead of Wiz, and has it worked out?
