Real World SLOs and SLIs: A Deep Dive

If you've read almost anything about SRE best practices, you've probably come across the idea that clearly defined and well-measured Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) are a key pillar of any reliability program. SLOs allow organizations and teams to make smart, data-driven decisions about risk and the right balance of investment between reliability and product velocity.

But in the real world, SLOs and SLIs can be challenging to define and implement. In this talk, we’ll dive into the nitty-gritty of how to define SLOs that support different reliability strategies and modalities of service failure. We’ll start by looking at key questions to consider when defining what “reliability” means for your organization and platform. Then we'll dig into how those choices translate into specific SLI/SLO measurement strategies in the context of different architectures (for example, hard-sharded vs. stateless random-workload systems) and availability goals.