Want to Learn More About SLOs & Error Budgets? Check Out This InfoWorld Article!

If you've attended any of Isos Technology's past webinars (and we sincerely hope you have...), you know that we have a great relationship with Isaac Sacolick, President of StarCIO. Isaac has moderated countless webinars for us and helped us do deep dives into topics ranging from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), to IT Service Management (ITSM), to DevOps. 

Isaac also happens to be a contributing editor at InfoWorld, and he recently wrote a fantastic article on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts: Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. This article, titled "How SLOs and Error Budgets Improve App Reliability," delves into how establishing SLOs helps to define realistic operational goals, while creating error budget policies and principles provides teams with prudent decision-making tools.

Isaac even quotes our fearless leader, Thad West, in this article. Thad talks about how SLOs can help teams shift to an operational mindset:

"You find many ops groups operating in a hero mode, flying from incident to incident, and that can sometimes become their identity. It can really burn out the IT team, and it’s a detriment to transformation."

Isaac also chatted with our friend from Nobl 9, Kit Merker, about the differences between managing SLOs and error budget vs. Service Level Agreements (SLAs):

“We want to gain confidence and deliver excellence with our customers. But at the same time, we have a business to run, and we want to do that sustainably. I think of the difference between the edge of excellence (the SLO) and hard-to-achieve perfection. Once we define the SLO, we can make really important automated business decisions about engineering our solution.”

For more information, make sure you check out the article.

Other Helpful Resources

If you're new to the concept of SLOs and error budgets—and how they relate to SRE—fear not. We've put together this great list of resources for you:

• Check out the recording of a webinar we hosted in March, featuring Isaac, Kit, and Thad, as panelists: SRE & Service Level Objectives: 5 Ways to Deliver Exceptional Service.
• Read a great article on SRE, written by Isaac, on the Isos Technology blog: 5 Surprising Insights on the Important SRE Role.
• We also recently published a blog that delves into SLIs. If you're unfamiliar with this confusingly similar acronym, learn more about SLIs in Already Know SLAs and SLOs? Now Meet Their Cool Friend, SLIs.