A Service Level Agreement (SLA) consists of many service commitments. It is an essential part of a contract to outsource software development or software support between two or more parties, specifying the duties and the quality and type of service a company would provide for a fee to a customer.

Monitoring is an essential function of enterprise SRE teams and a critical component of business service deliverability. Its importance has only grown as enterprise environments and technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Unfortunately, traditional monitoring is no longer enough.

Starting small and scaling your systems to serve billions of requests per month is never an easy path, so how do you build an infrastructure whilst making the right decisions and compromises for your services? Choosing the right technology stack and ensuring your CI/CD pipeline is reliable are two key steps towards this which we will explore.

Resilience is the capability to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness. It is not about preventing failures, but being able to recover from them quickly. As Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels famously said ‘everything fails all the time’. It’s a fact of life that failures will inevitably happen but what we can do is build applications that can withstand different kinds of failures. For example, in a data center, hardware is going to fail all the time.

What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive Site Reliability Engineering turn out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question that teams at about 400 businesses have presumably had to ask themselves this month in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud.