SLOs – The Emerging Universal Language in the Enterprise
To remain relevant in an information-driven society, enterprises across the globe undergo digital transformation projects to improve their agility and velocity. These changes have impacts on people, processes and the technology stack. Application architectures will become inherently distributed, leveraging modern cloud-native design principles and hybrid cloud deployments. Cross-team collaboration and breaking down communication silos are mandatory to realize the benefits of digital transformation. Flexible contracts and an easy to understand common language are required to address these concerns and set expectations right.
Service level objectives (SLOs), well established in the world of cloud and services providers, have the capabilities to become this new language. SLOs represents key metrics on which the different actors, or more general service consumers and producers, agree on. However, they are not considered a first-class concept in the enterprise yet. We predict that over the next years, SLOs will see significant adoption across the enterprise to tame complexity and reduce misunderstandings. Ultimately, SLOs will become the needed universal language (lingua franca) in and between businesses.
How do we decide whether a product is of good or bad quality? It turns out that this is based on a very subjective decision-making process, involving aspects such as look and feel, price, durability, usability, maintenance, personal preferences and experiences, etc. And thus, it’s very likely that consumers of a product or service will not come to the same conclusion about its quality.
This presents a challenge for the producer (product) or service provider, unless everyone agrees on the same definition of “good quality”. Let’s use a car manufacturer as an example. A car is a complex technical masterpiece made up of millions of different parts that wear out over time and eventually will fail. To keep customers happy in a highly competitive market, for a car producer it’s imperative to deliver as fast as possible, be efficient (i.e. reduce cost and waste) and minimize the risk of failures. One approach to achieve these contradictory goals, and popularized by Toyota, is generally understood as lean manufacturing. Later these principles paved its way into the enterprise, also known as the lean enterprise.
An important aspect behind the “lean” movement is a clear understanding of what value and quality the customer wants for a product or service. Streamlined processes, shortened feedback loops and continuous improvement aim to minimize risk, waste and overproduction on the producer side, directly translating into increased value and quality for its consumers.
To set customer expectations right, a producer publishes parameters and thresholds within the product is guaranteed to perform correctly. Continuing with the car example above that could be environment temperature, pressure, maximum speed, emissions, consumption, etc. Within an industry these metrics are typically globally standardized and legally binding. Eventually, they become part of the contract between the producer and consumer.
How does this relate to information technology (IT) one might ask? With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS), and cloud computing in general, customer expectations and demand has never been higher. Velocity to deliver new features and bug fixes as quickly as possible, 24×7 availability and global scale are key to succeed in extremely competitive markets where the winner often takes it all.
However, purely focusing on shipping new features is shortsighted, because every new feature imposes a change, uncertainty and ultimately risk to the service (or platform) itself. This could potentially impact performance and availability. Blindly throwing resources at the problem won’t help either. For every business these resources are finite and put pressure on the margin which feeds innovation.
