You can have the most resilient and robust system in the world, but if your customers are not completing their journeys, adoption and success will be hard to attain. In Accelerate , a book by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, we dig into the organizational science of high-performing technology teams. The authors recommended measuring software delivery performance into four key metrics. Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Mean Time to Restore (MTTR), and Change Failure Percentage. Lead Time In lean manufacturing, the lead time is the amount of time it takes from a customer request to the fulfillment of that request. In the technology domain, this can be the time from when code is checked in to when the code is deployed into production. Deployment Frequency The number of times that deployments to production occur in an amount of time. Are you deploying to production every day, week, month, year? The more frequently your internal customers can d...
Both DevOps and SRE teams value metrics, as you can’t improve on what you can’t measure. Indicators and measurements of how well a system is performing can be represented by one of the Service Level (SLx) commitments. There is a trio of metrics, SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs, that paint a picture of the agreement made vs the objectives and actuals to meet the agreement. With SLOs and SLIs, you can garner insight into the health of a system. SLAs Service Level Agreements are the commitment/agreement you make with your customers. Your customers might be internal, external, or another system. SLAs are usually crafted around customer expectations or system expectations. SLAs have been around for some time, and most engineers would consider an SLA to be “we need to reply in 2000ms or less,” which in today’s nomenclature would actually be an SLO. An SLA, in that case, would be “we require 99% uptime.” SLOs Service Level Objectives are goals that need to be met in order ...