SRE Community Launches OpenSLO Specification at SLOConf

New open source schema for Service Level Objective specification to spark widespread industry adoption of same proven SLO techniques born at Google

Nobl9, the software reliability platform company and host of SLOconf, today announced that together with core contributors including some of the world's most renowned Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Service Level Objective (SLO) experts, it has released OpenSLO as an open source project under the Apache 2 (APLv2) license. OpenSLO is the industry’s first standard SLO specification, designed to make SLOs ergonomic to modern developer Git workflow, and providing a common interface for widespread integration with the full ecosystem of cloud infrastructure and application monitoring and performance tooling.

“Just like the crucial role that Docker played in standardizing the container format, and that Helm played in standardizing Kubernetes package management – OpenSLO is bringing a common format to service level objective definition,” said Niall Richard Murphy, an OpenSLO core contributor, former SRE at Google and Microsoft, and co-author and editor of platinum-selling Site Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly, 2016). “Now SRE teams can implement SLOs with the promise of deep community support for a common spec, and potential for broad interoperability across the vendor landscape.”

Murphy joins other OpenSLO core committers including Andrew Newdigate (distinguished engineer, infrastructure, GitLab), Juergen Etzlstorfer (technology strategist, Dynatrace), Alex Nauda (chief technology officer at Nobl9), and Ian Bartholomew (lead site reliability engineer at Nobl9).

“Migrating to SLOs has been a major factor in improving the reliability of GitLab.com,” said Andrew Newdigate, distinguished engineer, infrastructure at GitLab Inc. "Additionally, error budgets provide an approach to engaging stakeholders from across the organization in our reliability engineering process. I would love for our customers to see the same benefits that we have from SLOs. Having an open standard is key to this. With OpenSLO, we will have a clear compatibility standard that gives developers confidence their SLO definitions aren’t locked in to one platform.”

According to a recent IDC Analyst Brief, “Site reliability engineering (SRE) is playing an increasingly important role in modern IT practices. Service-level objectives (SLOs) are one of the foundational opportunities to link SRE value directly to business outcomes that drive reliability and great customer experiences.”

SLOs allow SREs to define reliability metrics that provide a baseline for system health that is fundamentally more accurate and useful than traditional approaches to service level agreements. As a standard YAML specification format for SLOs, OpenSLO ships with a parser and basic validation and testing capabilities in its initial release.

“There is a growing sentiment in the SRE community that SLOs will become a standard component in the software development lifecycle, and across all of the observability tooling that SREs use to monitor application and system health,” said Marcin Kurc, CEO at Nobl9. “OpenSLO is the first major step in a common format that SREs can use for specification, and we believe this will open the floodgates for SLO integration from every major observability vendor, as well as SLOs becoming a first-class citizen in the modern DevOps lifecycle.”

Call for Participation from the SRE and Vendor Communities

The OpenSLO team invites the broader SRE industry to participate in the evolution of this common reliability specification through integrations and features contributions, and from these classes of contributors in particular:

1- Application Lifecycle Management Vendors

2- Cloud Providers

3- Open Source Projects and Frameworks

4- Service Partners Consulting Enterprises on SRE and Agile

Additional Resources

• Access the OpenSLO Spec on GitHub
• Contribute to the OpenSLO Spec

About Nobl9

Nobl9, the software reliability platform company, is in the noble pursuit of reliable software. Founded by Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, who joined Google via acquisition of Orbitera, Nobl9 helps software developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers deliver reliable features faster through software-defined Service Level Objectives that link monitoring and other logging and tracing data to user happiness and business KPIs. The company is backed by Battery Ventures, CRV, Bonfire, Harmony, Resolute, and Sorenson and is headquartered in Boston with a distributed team. More at nobl9.com and at the Nobl9 free resource library.

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