3 years ago

Unless you’re operating an Astute-class submarine hundreds of meters beneath the surface of the sea, chances are good that your infrastructure and software development stack relies on third-party technologies. These technologies no doubt provide great value to your technology stack and deliver significant cost efficiencies (saving time, money, and other resources), but they also expose your operations to risk in terms of reliability.

In some cases, you may be lucky enough to have options to choose from for your third-party services, but you will typically pay steep premiums for the service that is more reliable.

If my system is built upon other systems, I can achieve high reliability only if the underlying systems are even more reliable than my service needs to be.

In summary, I’ll admit to you that I think SLOs are magical in their ability to establish shared vision and collaboration not only between internal departments but with third-party service providers as well.