Reliability and SRE
Reason about a service's reliability targets the way the reliability standard does - set an SLO from the user's journey, compute the error budget it buys, and operate the service against that budget with burn-rate alerts, sustainable on-call, a toil cap, and the freeze that stops shipping when the budget runs out.
Units5
Duration29 min
Levelintermediate
By the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Explain why reliability is engineered as a budgeted feature, not chased as an absolute, and why SRE is an engineering discipline rather than a renamed ops rota.
- Set an SLO from a critical user journey, pick the right tier target, and compute the error budget and burn rate it produces.
- State the error-budget policy - freeze on exhaustion, one named owner, security exempt - and say what it buys operationally: sustainable on-call, a capped toil load, tested resilience, and an SLA that is always looser than the SLO behind it.
- Read the reliability standard and ADR-0020 as the source of truth for a service's reliability posture, and know when a different value requires an Accepted RFC.
Prerequisites
- Completion of "Work the request lifecycle", or equivalent familiarity with the estate's propose-only change process.
- Familiarity with SLIs and telemetry is helpful; this module defines SLO and error budget from first principles.