Favorite thing about SLOs

I think my favorite thing about SLOs is that error budget burndown uses calculus hehe https://t.co/iLS9TNCH4n

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020

if you want to alert on error budget burn rate, well that's alerting on rate of change of rate of change

aka derivative of the derivative
aka acceleration

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020

how this looks as a word problem:
your SLO requires 99.9% uptime. define a function that'll alert you when you're within 6 hours of burning through your error budget.

then use that function to set your PagerDuty alarm

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020

if your service is degraded (or down) you're gonna burn through error budget *faster*.

you need to track those accelerations and decelerations. how soon are we out of budget? can this wait until morning?

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020

calculus was my favorite part of math btw, although I had a great teacher in high school.

least favorite parts were probability and combinatorics. arithmetic is just data entry 😤

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020

I never took formal math classes but I did take differential equations and linear algebra (thought I wanted to be a math major at first) and that played a huge role in my confidence going back to school for CS

— shelby reliability engineer (@shelbyspees) August 17, 2020