Tech Tutorials with Piyush on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Running production: reliability, observability, performance and security · Proficient · Lesson 71 of 98 · 19 min video, then about 6 hours of practice
Service level objectives and error budgets
After this you can define SLIs and SLOs for a service, set alerts on burn rate, and use an error budget to decide between reliability work and features.
Why it matters
An SLO is a target for how reliable a service needs to be, measured from the user's point of view. It turns 'is it reliable enough?' from an argument into a number. The error budget, what is left between the SLO and perfection, tells you when to slow down and fix things and when you can move fast. Pick SLIs that reflect user experience (successful requests, latency at a percentile), not CPU usage. Trap: 100% targets. They are impossible, and chasing them blocks all change.
How to use this resource
SLI, SLO, SLA and error budgets in plain English, with examples.
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Practice