Service level agreements (SLA) and service level objectives (SLO) are increasing in popularity because modern applications rely on a complex web of sub-services such as public cloud services and third-party APIs to operate, making service quality measurement an operational necessity for serving a demanding market. This article focuses on the similarities and differences between SLAs and SLOs, explains the intricacies involved in implementing them, presents a case study, and finally recommends industry best practices for implementing them.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a practice that emerged at Google because of its need for highly reliable and scalable systems. SRE unifies operations and development teams and implements DevOps principles to ensure system reliability, scalability, and performance. There's plenty of documentation on tactics for adopting automation and implementing infrastructure as code, but practical ops-focused SRE best practices based on real-world experience are harder to find. This article will explore 6 SRE best practices based on feedback from SREs and technical subject matter experts.