McCoy SLIs and SLOs Demystified

A workshop approach to building and maintaining your service level indicators and service level objectives
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83588-939-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

In today's digital landscape, ensuring service reliability is more than just a necessity-it's a competitive advantage. SLIs and SLOs Demystified equips software engineers, SREs, and business leaders with the knowledge to build, measure, and manage service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) efficiently. Written by Alexandra F. McCoy-an experienced site reliability engineer with over a decade of experience in the cloud and technology industry-this book simplifies complex reliability concepts for engineers at all levels.
Starting with a review of reliability engineering basics, Alexandra provides a step-by-step approach to defining impactful SLIs, facilitating productive SLO discussions, and integrating observability into your monitoring strategy. You'll also see how these principles apply to web applications, distributed systems, databases, and new features through real-world examples that can help you develop SLIs and SLOs for your specific environment. The book goes beyond implementation to explore the financial impact of reliability, alerting strategies, integration with incident management, and using error budgets for business decisions.
By the end of this book, you'll be able to drive operational excellence, minimize unplanned downtime, and optimize end user experiences with well-established reliability metrics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McCoy, Alexandra F.

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik Programmierung | Softwareentwicklung Software Engineering

Leseproben

Preface

Reliability engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), is the practice used to improve the reliability of software systems through automating IT operations. The practice consists of a set of hierarchal layers, each incorporating its own principles and guidelines to build upon one another. Within this practice, Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are used to measure how well services are performing. These measurements help an organization make informed technical decisions, fostering accountability for commitments made to customers within a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

This book focuses on establishing and running a workshop to create SLIs and SLOs with your engineering teams. It is also filled with information that integrates concepts such as observability, “as-a-service” offerings, and structuring an SRE team to encourage the usage of other practices and get the mind prepared for pre- and post-concepts that are key to the long-term success of the work done within the workshops.

Who this book is for

This book is intended for experienced SRE and DevOps engineers invested in the practice of SRE. This includes other development or software engineering personas dedicated to embedding reliability into their services and seeking technical and process-related implementation examples for building and managing SLIs and SLOs.

In more detail, the target audience of this book is as follows:

• SRE teams: SRE engineers tasked with the responsibility of implementing SLIs and SLOs.
• DevOps engineering: DevOps engineers looking to understand SLIs and SLOs with regard to SRE.
• Development/software engineering teams: Other development roles looking to understand SLIs and SLOs with regard to SRE and seeking a starting point.

If starting the process for implementing SLIs within the next few weeks or months is the goal for you or your organization, then this book is for you. There’s a little something for everyone, including you executives!

What this book covers

, , provides a brief overview and introduction to the hierarchy of reliability engineering and the relationship between service level metrics used to measure system performance.

, , provides guidelines for building a team dedicated to creating SLIs and SLOs if required, while establishing a relationship with stakeholders and product engineering teams.

, , introduces the concept of a persona and persona journey used in the SLI and SLO process to ensure your focus remains on customer versus consumption.

, , provides information related to observability, monitoring, and the relationship to visibility to improve reliability engineering practices. This chapter also introduces observability as a layer within the hierarchy of reliability.

, , provides insights related to the benefits of incorporating reliability engineering and SLIs and SLOs into your organization. It also provides insights regarding the risk of not investing.

, , provides an introduction and outline of the steps to create and implement SLIs and SLOs. The chapter also discusses the steps necessary prior to creating your workshop.

, , provides an example of a workshop for SLIs and SLOs centered around web applications.

, , provides an example of a workshop for SLIs and SLOs centered around distributed systems.

, , provides an example of a workshop for SLIs and SLOs centered around database performance.

, , provides an example of a workshop for SLIs and SLOs centered around new features within a system.

, , provides information and examples related to configuring monitoring and alerting for SLOs. It also provides insights into deploying your SLOs into dashboard management platforms.

, , provides insights into managing SLOs daily. It also includes approaches to help facilitate iterating and adjusting your indicators and objectives over time.

, , provides a workshop example for creating SLIs and SLOs dedicated to incident management. It also highlights the importance of extending accountability to engineering teams.

, , provides information related to packaging your SLIs and SLOs as a service offering internally and externally. It also outlines the product lifecycle for SLOs.

To get the most out of this book

The goal of this book is to work through workshop examples for creating SLIs and SLOs. Terminology and concepts related to other domains within the technology are mentioned. However, you will need to understand the following:

• Application architecture and terminology
• Networking terminology
• Infrastructure-related concepts
• Have a basic understanding of SLAs

There are no requirements related to software or code downloads. However, I will challenge you to think of an application, infrastructure, or platform to flow through the workshop chapters.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “It is important to not confuse redirection at this stage with receiving a 301 or 308 response code that is provided to the customer.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

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Über Autor(innen)

McCoy Alexandra F. :

Alexandra F. McCoy has worked within the software and technology industry, in various roles, for the last 12 years. She spent a portion of that time as a site reliability engineer. Much of her experience was spent within the cloud sector, including hybrid cloud and on-premises Kubernetes environments, implementing cloud-native solutions for container orchestration. She enjoys the practice of reliability engineering, cloud-native development, and container orchestration as they relate to architecting solutions for customers within various industries. She spends her free time with family & close friends, and dedicates time to mentor junior engineers and professionals, with aspirational goals of successfully developing within the technology field.