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Holidays, Entrepreneurship and SLOs with Nobl9

It's finally here, the end of season 1 of the podcast is upon us! To celebrate, Santa is bringing something special - entrepreneurship advice for all the would-be founders of the world, ages 1 to 92.

Brian Singer, co-founder & CPO of Nobl9, sits down with Dev Interrupted to help us close out season 1 with a conversation on what it takes to found your own company. Having founded a pair of companies, one of which he sold to Google, Brian has a deep understanding of what it takes to successfully found and scale a startup. More than that, he knows what VCs are looking for. 

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Forget SLAs – Today, It’s All About Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)

What’s Wrong With SLAs?

“A service-level agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a client,” according to Wikipedia. “Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user.”

SLAs are thus contracts between third parties – contracts that can drive the wrong business outcomes.

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Little Known Ways to Better Use Your Error Budgets

One of the most versatile and foundational SRE tools is the SLO, or service level objective. The SLO is a threshold set for key reliability metrics. When incidents push the metric over the threshold, a response launches to prevent further damage. Conversely, as long as you meet your SLO, you can continue to ship new code. The space you have before you breach this threshold is the error budget. When evaluating new developments, you can judge if the error budget can accommodate the potential risk of unreliability.

We generally think of the error budget as a tool for developers. It helps them understand tradeoffs between development velocity and reliability. But error budgets can be helpful to many roles throughout the organization. In this blog post, we’ll look at how error budgets can help cross-functional teams across the organization such as QA, legal, executives, and more. We’ll also look at ways engineers can use error budgets beyond development planning.

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Four Ways SRE Helps New Employees Onboard

Onboarding is an essential yet challenging part of the hiring process. As your organization matures, more of its processes become unique. This makes it harder for new employees to get up to speed. Investing in custom processes and tooling to achieve your specific goals is a valuable practice. But, you must balance this with an investment in onboarding.

Fortunately, an investment in SRE is also an investment in onboarding, as one of the important goals of SRE is to help democratize context across software teams. At first, SRE may seem like an area with a high learning curve. The diversity of the skills expected of the SRE role can make it difficult to hire for. However, these skills help broaden engineer’s abilities and understanding of their organization’s systems. The SRE mentality can provide insights into many areas, including onboarding itself.