book

SLO Adoption and Usage in Site Reliability Engineering

by Julie McCoy, Nicole Forsgren

April 2020

Intermediate to advanced

102 pages

2h 23m

English

O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Managing Change with SLOs and Error Budgets SLOs Solve the Dev/Ops SplitKey Findings from the SLO Adoption and Usage Survey
What We Hope You Take Away from This ReportResources AvailableAcknowledgments
Defining SRE Terms for Measuring and Managing Your SystemSLIs: How Do We Measure Performance Against Our Goals?SLOs: What Are Our Goals?SLAs: What Level of Service Are We Promising Our Customers? SLOs Are the Driving Force Behind SRE TeamsSLOs Are Powerful Business Tools That Drive Financial and Operational PerformanceSLOs and Error Budgets Allow Maximum Change Velocity While Protecting Stability SLOs Keep Business Decisions Focused on Customer HappinessSLOs Set Customers’ ExpectationsSummary
Who Took Our SurveyGeographic RegionPrincipal Industry Organization SizeTitles of Survey RespondentsMost Firms Have Had SRE Teams for Fewer Than Three Years Who Uses SLOsSLOs Are a New Practice for Many OrganizationsLarge Companies Have More Experience Using SLOsRecent SLO Adoption in Europe Outpaces Other RegionsHow Organizations Use SLOs Most Firms Embrace SRE Practices but Fail to Engage in SLOs Critical Infrastructure Is the Most Common Service Measured by SLOsMajority of Respondents Measure “Some” of Their Services with SLOsSLOs Above 99% Are Most Common Among RespondentsInternal Action Is the Most Common Response to Missing SLOs SLO Reviews Are Underutilized by the Majority of Respondents Availability Is the Top SLI MeasurementSummary
Do Not Let Perfect Be the Enemy of GoodSLOs: What They Are and Why We Have ThemHow Do We Prioritize Reliability Versus Other Features? Can We Release New Features and Risk Breaking the System Without Significantly Impacting the User’s Experience? How Do We Weigh Operational Versus Project Work?Characteristics of Meaningful SLOsUser-CentricChallenging but Not Too ChallengingSpecific yet Simple Shared Sense of SLO OwnershipBest Practices for SLO SelectionAvoid 100% Targets and Absolutes Base SLOs on Current Performance if You Have Nothing Else Group SLOs by User Experience Develop More Than One Target for Some ServicesGive Yourself a Buffer Have a Plan to IterateSummary
Defining SLIsSLIs Are Metrics to Deliver User HappinessCommon SLI TypesRequests and ResponseData ProcessingStorage SLI StructureStandardize SLIsAggregate MeasurementsDeveloping SLIsSLI Specifications and SLI Implementations Tracking Reliability with SLIs AvailabilityLatencyQualityWays to Measure SLIsUse SLIs to Define SLOsAchievable SLOsAspirational SLOsDetermine a Time Window for Measuring SLOsSLO Examples for Availability and LatencyIterating and Improving SLOsSummary
The Relationship Between SLOs and Error Budgets Negotiating Technical Work Versus Development Velocity Stakeholder Buy-in and Establishing an Error-Budget PolicySummary
Schlumberger’s SLO JourneyWhy Schlumberger Implemented SREImplementing the First SLOs for a Nonnative Cloud Application Establishing and Evolving SLOs for Products That Are Not Yet LiveExample: How Having SLOs Led to a Better Customer ExperienceMonitoring and AlertingEvangelizing SRE and SLOsWhat’s NextEvernote’s SLO JourneyStart at the BeginningEvernote Today: Transitioning to a Shared Responsibility ModelReducing Inefficiencies for a Progressive EnvironmentTaking the Mystery Out of Resource AllocationQuantifying the Impact of Outages on UsersWhere Evernote Is TodaySummary

Overview

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)—a framework for managing enterprise software systems, first developed at Google—helps lower operational costs, enhance development productivity, and increase feature release. But if service-level objectives (SLOs) aren’t part of your SRE strategy, you’re leaving value on the table. This practical report details why and how to make SLOs, service-level indicators (SLIs), and error budgets critical components of your SRE practice.

Drawing on results from Google’s recent SLO Adoption and Usage Survey, along with real-world case studies, this guide walks you through defining and determining an acceptable level of reliability and using it to set expectations for stability and better manage system changes. Whether you’re an SRE, executive, developer, or architect, you’ll learn how to improve your SRE practices by taking an SLO and error-based approach to measuring and managing your service.

Understand common service-level terminology, including objectives, indicators, agreements, and error budgets
Build SLOs and SLIs step by step
Use error budgets to align and jointly make decisions about reliability and development velocity
See how Schlumberger and Evernote implemented SLOs and used the insights gained to manage their businesses