How to set SLOs, drive improvements, and make friends with business stakeholders

Make reliability a shared priority, not just tech-speak. This session shows you how to frame SLOs in business terms, engage stakeholders, and use clear metrics to align technical and business priorities.

Transcript

2. But did we make reliability a shared priority?
3. “ How to set SLOs, drive improvement, and make friends with business stakeholders Maxim Schepelin Engineering Manager at Booking.com schepelin.com @schepelin everywhere
4. Why is it hard to negotiate technical debt?
5. “ How much do we lose if our services go down for one hour?
6. 01. Define your Service-Level Objectives in business terms
7. X must be true Y percentage of the time.
8. Common availability numbers Downtime per day Downtime per year 99% Availability 99.9% 99.95% 99.99% 99.999% 14.5 minutes 1.5 minutes 43 seconds 9 seconds < 1 second 3.5 days 8.5 hours 4.2 hours 52 minutes ~5 minutes From: https://uptime.is
9. 02. Define how you calculate the cost of an outage
10. Week over week comparison shows the impact
11. 03. Report how your systems perform against SLO
15. MAKE RELIABILITY A SHARED PRIORITY Step 01 Define SLOs in business terms Step 02 Agree on how to estimate the cost of an outage Step 03 Report how your systems perform against SLOs ⟶ Move beyond the technical level ⟶ Connect SLOs to the business metrics ⟶ Measure if your systems are doing what they're supposed to ⟶ Share weekly updates with business stakeholders ⟶ Highlight business impact ⟶ Pinpoint major factors for SLO violations. ⟶ Apply the same approach to every outage ⟶ Use business metrics to measure the value of technical improvements ⟶ Prefer simple approach over complicated like WoW
16. v THANK YOU Any questions?