Speaker 1: Imagine you promised your app would be available 99.9% of the time. That still allows roughly nine hours of downtime a year. Speaker 2: Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, turns those promises into math we can track. The key tools are service level objectives, or SLOs, and the error budgets tied to them. Speaker 1: By defining how reliable a service must be, we can decide when it's safe to launch new features and when it's time to pause and fix instability.
Speaker 1: A service level objective is basically a reliability target, like "respond to user requests within two seconds 99% of the time." It sets clear expectations. Speaker 2: For non-technical folks, think of an SLO as a promise to customers. If we hit that goal, users stay happy. If we miss it, they notice glitches or slow pages. Speaker 1: We monitor these objectives continuously so we know if the service is drifting away from the acceptable range before customers complain.
Speaker 1: An error budget is the small slice of allowable failure built into an SLO. If our target is 99.9% uptime, that gives us about forty minutes of downtime each month. Speaker 2: As outages or performance issues occur, we "spend" that budget. When it's gone, engineering focuses on reliability work instead of shipping new features. Speaker 1: This approach keeps everyone aligned. Product managers see how instability eats into development time, while engineers know exactly when to slow their release pace.
Speaker 1: Error budgets aren't just for ops teams. They spark conversations about risk across the organization. Speaker 2: When the budget burns down faster than expected, it's a sign our releases might be too risky or our SLO is unrealistic. Speaker 1: Teams can agree to slow deployments, add more testing, or even adjust the SLO if customer impact warrants it. The data helps remove emotion from those decisions.
Speaker 1: The real win is shared language. SLOs and error budgets help teams quantify acceptable risk instead of arguing about perfection. Speaker 2: They also create breathing room. When you're under budget, you can innovate quickly. When it's nearly spent, stability becomes the priority. Speaker 1: By treating reliability like any other feature, SRE practices keep users happy and developers focused on the right work at the right time.