Error budgets

 

Congratulations! You passed!

Grade received 75%

To pass 75% or higher

1.

Question 1

What is an error budget? Select all that apply (2 correct responses).

0 / 1 point

A quantitative metric for service unreliability.

Correct

Great job! Error budgets are a measurement of service unreliability.

The inverse of an SLO.

The time it takes to fix bugs.

The time you use to push new releases.

This should not be selected

No, the time spent pushing new releases doesn’t factor into an error budget. (But if you serve more errors during a release, you will certainly burn some of your error budget!)

2.

Question 2

Who is responsible for preventing error budget exhaustion? Select all that apply (2 correct responses).

1 / 1 point

SRE teams

Correct

Correct! It’s the development and SRE teams who are responsible for preventing error budget exhaustion

Executives

Development teams

Correct

Correct! It’s the development and SRE teams who are responsible for preventing error budget exhaustion.

Software product managers

3.

Question 3

What are the benefits to using error budgets? Select all that apply (3 correct responses).

1 / 1 point

Developers can self-regulate and manage risk better with error budgets.

Correct

Great job! Error budgets are a great common incentive for your development and SRE teams to help strike a balance between reliability and development velocity. They also allow teams to self-regulate and manage the risks they take with new features.

Error budgets make it easier to punish teams that cause outages.

Responding to outages becomes easier with an error budget in place.

Error budgets align incentives between different parts of the organization.

Correct

Great job! Error budgets are a great common incentive for your development and SRE teams to help strike a balance between reliability and development velocity. They also allow teams to self-regulate and manage the risks they take with new features.

Error budgets help to balance development velocity and reliability.

Correct

Great job! Error budgets are a great common incentive for your development and SRE teams to help strike a balance between reliability and development velocity. They also allow teams to self-regulate and manage the risks they take with new features.

4.

Question 4

True or false, you need executive buy-in for your error budgets.

1 / 1 point

False

True

Correct

True! When teams have executive obligations to meet agreed-upon SLOs, that means there’s backing to make sure that both the dev and SRE teams can do their jobs while staying within SLO.

Reliability and iterating

 

Congratulations! You passed!

Grade received 100%

To pass 66% or higher

1.

Question 1

True or false, you should always aim to make your service as reliable as it can possibly be.

1 / 1 point

False

True

Correct

Correct! Remember that 100% reliability is almost always the wrong target. It becomes much, much more expensive to make systems even more reliable, so there’s some point where the marginal cost of reliability exceeds the marginal value of reliability.

2.

Question 2

What are some characteristics of a good SLO target? Select all that apply (2 correct responses).

1 / 1 point

Ambitious but achievable

Correct

Yes, a good SLO should be ambitious and yet achievable. Plus, you’ll want to find the right point where it’s good enough to keep customers happy.

Just high enough to keep the product managers happy

Challenging to meet all of the time

Just high enough to keep customers happy

Correct

Yes, a good SLO should be ambitious and yet achievable. Plus, you’ll want to find the right point where it’s good enough to keep customers happy.

3.

Question 3

True or false, once you’ve set your SLOs you never have to touch them again.

1 / 1 point

True

False

Correct

That’s right. It’s recommended that you revisit and reassess your SLOs at agree-upon intervals throughout the year as systems change over time.