Magic Numbers and second guessing SLOs - why is 96% better than 95%?
I’ve had a half written draft of this post sitting in a folder for the last six months and I’ve not been able to shake the root cause so I’m going to publish it and see what the feedback teaches me. But first the heresy - Service Level Objectives make me uncomfortable. I have no issue with the idea that you need some form of measurement and tracking to ensure you’re maintaining an acceptable level of service but when reading posts on SLOs, or watching recorded conference sessions, the concept seems to imply some rigour and background process to determine the numbers to work towards that feels decoupled from any hard details and often comes across as either a guesstimate or just a Current Representation of Actual Percentages.
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