Module 4: Scale, Reliability & Performance: Guided Labs

Lab 1: SLI/SLO and Error Budget

Define user-visible availability and latency SLIs from real request data. Choose targets, calculate budget, and create fast/slow burn alerts tied to action.

Lab 2: Saturation Test

Load a service from idle through overload. Record throughput, p50/p95/p99 latency, errors, utilization, and queue depth. Explain the knee and bottleneck with evidence.

Lab 3: Graceful Overload

Add admission control, bounded queues, deadlines, degradation, and retry budgets. Repeat the load test and compare failure containment.

Lab 4: Incident Exercise

Run a dependency-latency or cache-stampede game day. Detect, triage, mitigate, recover, and write a blameless review with owned actions.

Evidence: dashboards, load data, alert/runbook, timeline, and follow-up verification.