Reliability isn't just for software teams
IT'S FOR ALL TEAMS
We unify the software development process and enable the successful delivery of more reliable software by arming and aligning business leaders, software engineers, and DevOps teams with the insights and tools they require, without internal conflict or competition.
Velocity vs. Reliability
Your customers rely on your service, but it seems you often put more energy into building new features. Frustrating flakiness means customers will leave you—and may even expect a refund.
When reliability becomes a major problem, the tendency is to lock everything in place. Freezing changes might work in a crisis, but slowing down your releases doesn’t make your software inherently more stable. Steering too far toward reliability—beyond anyone’s expectations—takes you off course and leaves you dead in the water.
Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are customer-centric goals that define expectations between the stakeholders of your service. SLOs are an essential tool for any Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to achieve sustainable customer happiness.
A balanced approach to reliability results in faster delivery, happier customers, better team-wide productivity, and business alignment.
How Can Your Team Deliver Reliable Features Faster?
Three Critical Needs of SRE
RELIABILITY GOALS
SRE shouldn’t guess what’s important to customers or the business. They need clear reliability guidelines about acceptable error rates and limits. This lets SREs focus their efforts on the right activities in alignment with business priorities.
PROACTIVE DEFENSE
SRE needs to know about outages before your customers. When there is a major issue, it’s all hands on deck. SRE doesn’t just respond to incidents; they defend your service before small issues erupt into outages.
CHAMPION OF RELIABILITY
To do their best work, SRE needs buy-in from leadership that reliability really does matter. This is more than a slogan, it means smart policies that balance the competing interests for engineering investments.
WHY ARE SLOS SO INTEGRAL?
SLOs are the magic that make site reliability engineering really work. Optimizing the tradeoff of feature velocity and reliability means formulating data-driven goals that everyone can get behind.
STANDARDIZED EXPECTATIONS
Reusing SLOs across your organization sets clear reliability guidelines so your team isn’t guessing, which means consistently delivering the service your users expect.
QUANTIFY USER HAPPINESS
Not all metrics are created equal. Find the keys to ensuring the right level of reliability, which will ultimately let you release reliable features faster while keeping customers happy.
AVOID DISPUTES
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not their own facts. SLOs put customers front and center, cutting through silos and confusion. Now you can focus on the right efforts as a team–avoiding the blame game.
THE NOBL9 PLATFORM UNIFIES YOUR ENTIRE BUSINESS AND SOFTWARE PROCESS.
PERIOD.
Ensuring reliable services to end-users is job one. Our platform enables your team to rally around your users by collecting service metrics from a variety of sources and filtering them through the lens of SLOs. This new context means every part of the organization—product and business stakeholders, developers, IT operations, and of course SRE—can have clarity about how their actions impact reliability and the bottom line. Not just more nines, but improved velocity from finding the right balance of feature and reliability investments.
NATIVELY CLOUD NATIVE
Our platform is designed to support your journey to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures, including creating SLOs for VM and bare-metal workloads. Whether you operate your own cloud or rely on a cloud services provider, we’ve got you covered. And our integrations with popular metrics and monitoring system makes set up a breeze.
GIT-OPTIMIZED
Nobl9 SLOs are driven from configuration-as-code with a rich language for defining service level objectives. All of our capabilities exist in CLI, API, and YAML files you can store in Git.
FAST AND FURIOUS METRICS
Nobl9 is designed to keep up with your scale and deliver clear SLO compliance in near real-time. Our platform ingests and processes millions of events per second, ready for enterprise and internet-scale services. But make no mistake – even smaller-scale services benefit from SLOs on the Nobl9 platform.
ERROR BUDGET MANAGEMENT
SLO metrics are great but just the beginning. Nobl9 tracks error budgets for all of your services so you can understand the trends and hot spots that may be affecting your service health right now and over time. Action is the key to managing reliability, and error budgets turn metrics into clear direction for your entire organization.
RESOURCES
We in the SRE world often speak in generalities about “customer happiness” and how SLOs can help us find that ideal balance between software reliability and the velocity at which we release new features. To be sure, for many of our conversations, it's expedient to refer to “the customer” as a homogeneous entity, as if...
Today I am joining Nobl9 as their principal site reliability engineer. My goal in life is to make people happy, and I think this company is following a noble pursuit to make this happen. Let me tell you the story about how my journey has led me here. About a decade ago I ended up...
Excuses! I’ve heard them all. When it comes to why people “hate” Service Level Objectives (SLOs), I have heard my share of explanations, so many, in fact, that I’ve been able to create a persona-based list of the most common: I’m an application developer. I hate SLOs because they are just a way of getting...
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the NOBL9 TEAM
Our team is focused every day on building reliable software. We’ve run global scale software services and have learned the hard way. We believe that it takes a variety of perspectives to truly optimize the delivery of the software and delight end users. Reliability is Job 1, and we are here to make that job easier for you.
INVESTORS
SIGN UP TO PREVIEW THE BETA
We’re still putting the finishing touches on Nobl9 platform, and we want your help. If you’d like to get involved in our Design Partner Program and Invite-Only Beta, please sign up below. We’d love to talk to you about how you approach SLOs today and gain insight and feedback from your SRE practice.