97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 68. The Order of Operations for Getting SLO Buy-In

David K. Rensin

Google

As the person driving your team, organization, or company toward the adoption of SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets, you will have to do a fair amount of convincing. For some people, the basic arguments for SLOs will run counter to the goals they have set for themselves and their teams. Others will want to prioritize feature velocity ahead of reliability work, and still others will doubt that the company is mature enough or good enough really to adopt these principles and techniques.

It’s important to realize now that the benefits of adopting an SLO-based approach will not be self-evident to everyone and that you will have to do a fair amount of patient explanation. Let’s build a game plan to get everyone on board. Like most things in engineering, the order of operation is important.

Based on experience, here’s my suggestion for the order in getting buy-in:

1. Engineering and operations

Your first step is to get both the engineering and operations teams on board with SLOs. This should be reasonably straightforward because SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets offer real benefits to each group. Their mutual agreement to the principles of SLOs is essential to getting other teams on board. Note that I said principles. The implementation details (error budget policies, SLO targets, etc.) will be negotiated later. ...