Reliability is a business contract
An SLO is not an engineering metric. It is a contract that says "this is the level of reliability the product needs, expressed in terms the rest of the business can understand."
What we set up
- Service Level Objectives per critical user journey, derived from the cost of failure
- Error budgets that drive deployment policy: healthy budget, ship freely; depleted budget, slow down and stabilize
- Dashboards segmented by audience: operators get real-time health, engineering leaders get trends, business leaders get value translation
- Runbooks that reduce mean time to recovery, written for the engineer at 3 AM
- Postmortem culture that lands on systems, not on people
On-call as a product
If on-call is painful, the system is broken — not the people. We design rotations and alerting so that pages happen when humans are actually needed, and stay quiet otherwise. The cost of false alerts compounds.
Reliability is revenue protection. We price it that way and we run it that way.