Focusing on SLOs and Reliability with Nobl9’s Brian Singer

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techron tv.

You know, uh, I was just catching up with my friend Brian Singer here, chief Product Officer, co-founder at Noble Nine. Uh, Brian's up in Boston where they, they seem to have dodged a storm, but, um, we were just up there and, and I felt terrible. I didn't reach out to, to, uh, meet with him, but I wanted to get an update on Noble nine.

We haven't had Brian on, and Brian, it's probably been six months or more, right? Yeah, I think, I think it's been about that long. Yep.

So, wanted to get an update on Noble nine and what's going on in the state of SLOs. Reliability, and, uh, just checking it. I mean, it's Been, yeah, thanks, Alan.

It's been a great year for us and for reliability in general. Um, what, what I'm hearing from customers and prospects and enterprises of all shapes and sizes is that, uh, they understand the impact, um, that really planning for reliability can have both on, uh, revenue, on, on profitability, and on, um, uh, the, the, the sort of velocity of, uh, of development. Um, and it's really a, I think for us it's been a change in conversation from trying to educate the market.

If you'll remember early on about the value of SLOs, the value of some of these SRE methodologies to now, I think there's a, an understanding that these are practices that should be sort of a, a baseline level of, of capability for most, uh, organizations where software is front and center for running their business, which today is pretty much everybody. Um, sure. So we are, we're having, um, sort of just more and more, uh, customers obviously, but more, um, uh, prospects coming to us, you know, wanting to learn about how do we do this?

How does Noble Nine help us do it? Um, and it's been, it's been great. And I think the other thing that's interesting is some of the, the analyst firms that I, I won't name, but, uh, you know, well-known analyst firms have sort of woken up to what's going on out here.

And, and I think are fielding a just a, an absolute ton of, uh, inquiries about the topic. And, um, so overall for us, it's been a shift from what's the value of SLOs, should I care about reliability to, okay, what's the best way to implement SLOs and how do I get the, the most successful outcomes? Look, quite frankly, you know, from where I sit, I think your initial battle was what is an SLO, right?

What is the difference between an SLA and an SLO? And that was really tied into the whole Kind of mantra and definition of what an A site reliability an SRE is. Yeah.

And, um, and you know, and look, I've started a bunch of companies over my career and, and have seen many others, and a and a kind of a difficult transition period for many companies is when they, they need to transition from being the missionary, right? The people who sort of define the market and, and give names to these things, to popping over now and say, okay, the missionary work is done. I've machete my way through the jungle, there's a trail here.

Now I gotta lead the flock through it, right? And I gotta continue to lead. Yes.

And, and, and it's kind of a little, it's, it might be subtle, but it's a different mission in many ways, right? Um, from missionary to cultivating a flock, if you will, of people who, who now walk that trail. Um, and I, you know, when I look at Noble nine, that's where, where I see it, um, you guys were, you know, probably the, the leader, at least from our, where we sit in, in this whole, you know, SRE and, and, and SLOs.

Not to say that there aren't bigger companies and that there's not a big community around SRE I'm not saying that, but you know, from where you, from what you guys have been preaching around SLO and stuff, you, you did do a ton of missionary work there. Um, you know, I think there's another aspect to it too, Brian, we're, we're doing a new, uh, well, people on out here will hear more about it, but we're doing this whole campaign around got DevOps mm-Hmm. Call it, got DevOps, sort of like, remember the old got milk with the white mustache?

Yep. com or that's one of our sites, right? We have 5, 6, 7 sites now.

But, um, but there was a lot of noise in the market. I that, you know, DevOps is old already. It's not the, that's not what the cool kids are doing.

You know, we, we want to be a platform engineer and we want to be an SRE, and we, we are a, uh, uh, uh, a, an observability engineer and, and all of these different things. We're hearing other things like, you know, maybe Agile's not so cool, we should go back to Waterfall. And the kind kinda stuff that would've been heresy, I think, you know, four or five years ago ago.

Um, in our mind though, this is all part of the evolution of, of what we call DevOps, right? The, we'll call it the way things get done today, the way software is developed, deployed, and managed, um, on infrastructure a lot in the cloud and cloud native. But it, it's all part of this continuum, if you will.

And, you know, I think SLOs and reliability are a big part of that, not a separate degraded, you know, standalone. It's part of this whole thing. I just wonder if that's resonates with you or Yeah, AB absolutely.

I think, um, it's interesting here, you tearing you mentioned like production, uh, engineering or platform engineering, um, definitely buzzwords that are getting more, uh, you know, more play. But I, I do think it all falls under this sort of umbrella at the end of the day of DevOps, of having, you know, this concept of having your developers involved in, in, in the operations, um, and, and vice versa. And having, you know, really good consistent communication and, and service level objectives, sort of stating upfront what sort of reliability, uh, goals we're trying to achieve here, I think is part of fostering that communication.

One of the things that we've realized is in setting reliability goals, you have to go to, uh, the business stakeholders, product managers, uh, you know, depending on, uh, who's, who's making business decisions to understand what, what those sort of goals should be, uh, and then using that to, to facilitate the engineering, uh, processes. So it's not engineering and DevOps in a silo, but in the context of what matters for the, for the business, and that leads to better overall outcomes for companies. Absolutely.

Does, um, we'll talk more about it in the coming weeks, but let's get a little update, you know, on this kind of next phase of, of what Noble Nine is, is moving onto here as SLOs reliability are becoming much more the norm. Yeah. So what we've seen is companies want to make the investment in reliability and service level objectives.

I think similar to what you might've seen five, 10 years ago in security, it was, Hey, let's shift left, let's bake security into the development process. Well, the same things happen from a reliability standpoint, I think folks have recognized is really hard to run systems reliably if you don't think about it until after you've actually already written the code and deployed the software. Mm-Hmm.

So we're seeing, we're seeing that same trend and we're seeing, uh, folks in companies that, that where their responsibility is to actually plan the reliability practices that are going to be part of the engineering process. And what one of the things we are doing is really focusing on partnering with that community because they have a really big challenge, right? They have a lot of accountability, but, but a lot of the time no authority to actually oversee the development.

So part of, part of where we've focused our effort is, okay, what are the, what, what sort of tooling can we provide to that audience to make their job easier? Yes, everybody wants to do SLOs, but if you are the, um, team or the individual overseeing the SLO program, overseeing, you know, you might be one individual overseeing, uh, a hundred or 200 or 500 developers that all have to implement SLOs. What sort of tools do you need to successfully roll out an SLO program?

And that's a little bit different from what we were focused on maybe two or three years ago, which was, okay, how do we make SLOs easy to understand and easy to create and, uh, you know, create, you know, make sure that the data's accurate and all those things, like those are table stakes. Now, to have a good SLO platform, now you need to be thinking about, it's not just how do I calculate one SLO, how do I manage a life cycle of a thousand SLOs in, in a company to make sure that they're delivering value? Because it's very easy to go create, you know, a thousand KPIs that nobody is ever gonna look at.

Uh, how do we make sure that these are things that are actually part of the discussion when it comes to prioritization, when it comes to operations, when it comes to understanding what outcomes we're delivering for customers? Absolutely. Stuff's real, right?

It that, that's exactly what it is. It gets real. So let, let's, you know, that's kind of the state of the market.

What's Noble nine doing to respond here and, and react and, and, you know, service your customers? Yeah, so a couple of the things from a product standpoint that we've really focused on and continue to push on are, uh, reporting is an area that is, uh, continues to get a lot of focus for us. How do you take, you know, what might be a thousand SLOs and turn them into something that, uh, maybe an executive can actually understand and comprehend.

Um, we also have, uh, you know, some new capabilities coming out later this month that we're going to announce, um, around, uh, you know, maybe some different views, uh, for, I, I won't give away too much, but some different views from, from some of our existing dashboards that give a lot more information as to what's, what the state of the system is, uh, at, at any given point in time. Um, and, and looking a little bit further out, we're really focused on how you tie SLOs together into a, into a user journey. Um, so if you think about it, understanding the reliability of a user journey, you can either take the telemetry ahead of time and stitch it together into an SLO or take the SLOs that you have and stitch that together into a story about the user journey.

Um, so we're focused on, on both aspects, uh, and we're sort of heads down in r and d on, on developing some new capabilities there. Excellent, excellent. Um, any plans around conferences or stuff like that where people might be able to Yeah, So we're actually make a real novel People.

We're actually be out at SR econ in March. Um, we'll have a booth there, you know, hope, hope to see a lot of folks, if you want a demo of some of these new capabilities that I've, I've just mentioned. Um, beyond that, I think we're still putting some of our, our conference plans together.

I know that Alex Algo will be really active on the speaker circuit this year. Um, and, uh, I'm sure we'll have, you know, sort of more, more exciting things to announce. That's great.

Alex is a, Alex is a real resource too, so if, if you can catch Alex somewhere, folks out there, if you see a conference or Alex might be speaking, I, I'd say don't miss that one. Um, Brian, just for people to know, SR econ, where is it this year? I believe it's in, in, uh, on the west coast of, uh, San Francisco or Santa Clara.

Don't quote me on that. One of the two. The Bay Area.

Somewhere in The Valley, bay area. Yeah. Yeah.

Very cool. Very cool. Brian.

Um, you know what, we didn't mention people who wanna get more information, maybe they're not familiar with Noble Nine, you know, uh, it's spelled NOBL number nine. That's right. So NOBL number nine.

Is that io I forget now. com. Yeah, Dot com.

com. com. We actually had a webinar, uh, last week that was incredibly well attended.

Um, and, uh, I think a lot of great content there from, again, from Alex. Uh, and we'll, we'll continue to have more of those in the future. Fantastic.

Brian, it's great reconnecting with you. I hope to see you in person soon, somewhere where it's warmer. Um, but, uh, keep up the great work at Noble Nine and let's not wait six months to get you back on here.

Sounds great. Happy to come on. Any, anytime.

Thanks, Alan. All righty. Brian Singer, chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Noble Nine, the, the leaders in SLO Rely and Reliability here on Tech Trunk tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a minute.