Service Level Objectives – Kit Merker, Nobl9

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I've got a my friend kid is here. So I'm not gonna make a big thing of it kitmerker. I know kit a number of years now kit is the COO at Noble nine Noble nine if you don't know was one of the early Movers in the whole SLO SRE space And they continue to be a leader in that market as well.

Hey kit. It's great to see. How are you man?

I'm good. Good. Thanks for help me Alan.

Nice to see you. Good. See you.

So kid I try to give people a little background on Noble night, but it was pretty feeble. I'm sure you can do a better job than me man. Why don't why don't you tell him sure thing?

Yes a noble nine. We're a service level observability platform. We're focused on as you mentioned this concept of service level objectives were the only purpose-built platform for service level objectives.

And really that the idea is that you're taking your monitoring data and you're adding in additional context so you can see how much it's failing and get ahead of problems save money be more productive and that it came out of kind of came out of the Google methodology, you know, this SRE stuff. They publish many years ago. It's interesting.

I was at Google, you know, and we took Borg and we turn it into kubernetes which is you know, but they took the operating model the S3 stuff and they gave you a book. So really what Noble mind is doing is we took the stuff from the book and we turn it into a platform that anybody can use even if you're not Google that's really the idea. I got it makes perfect sense, too.

But you know look the whole SLO thing has has really grown beyond the book it has right and you know from from the kinds of organizations using it to I mean a whole not much not out not even just the community a whole echo system has flourished around it and and Noble nine is kind of the heart of it. So well, yes, they are saying that we we're trying to be one of the most interesting things I think in the last six months that we've seen is it used to be like what is an SLO? What does this mean?

And now we're really seeing much more productive, you know initiatives big companies large Banks large organizations. We just announced procore as a customer just recently there there more and more of them have SLO initiatives that are being led from the top and part of it is a realization. They got to do more with less everybody's in this boat right now.

And so when you look at your team and how you make them productive, you got to have the the Tooling in place. So in the community angle we created this thing we launched it slow conf, which has been back in May called slow DLC slow development lifecycle. I think you and I may even spoke about spoken about it.

Yeah slow DLC has now. Become kind of the the de facto approach that people are using to drive SLO adoption and our friends at Accenture and cognizant in particular have picked up slow DLC as part of their Consulting practices. And so now when they're doing these large Enterprise rollouts, you know, it's not good enough to just pick up a tool or some, you know, Cobble together some open source stuff.

You got to really have you know, your your plan. So that's been one. I think really particularly interesting is going from tinkering and exploring to people now getting pretty serious about the SLO adoption and then the other part of the community, you know, we we've seen a bunch of interest in open SLO and you know, all these open projects open apis and things open Telemetry.

There's I think there's open feature. Now, there's a bunch of different openness. And that's an open SLO is you know, you had another one which it's it's a cool thing too because One of the challenges Enterprise companies have is they got to be very smart about tool selection.

They have to manage the risk as their adopting Platforms in particular in particular when they have to build intellectual property around those you make a decision to adopt a big Erp platform like sap, you're making, you know your own IP around how you invest in that in that platform and the same is true. When you choose an observability tool or automation platform or ci/cd, you're building your own intellectual property around that ecosystem that stack of tools you're building and so one of the things we see with a lot of Enterprise customers is they want to be able to leave and keep their IP and so open SLO has really solved this problem. If you buy from Noble 9, for example, and you eventually say, you know, what?

I don't want to be locked in. I want to be able to switch to something else. You've now built your your SLO yaml using an open standard and you can you know, pick that up and move to another another platform very quickly easily.

So this eliminates a big concern that that a lot of customers have and when they're looking At SLO tooling, you know, if they're choosing a different vendor in the market. There's a question they can ask is like, okay how locked in am I gonna be on that platform versus something that has an open an open API? Call absolutely.

Just want to make sure people realize so open SLO is kind of a a standalone. I mean it was kind of it was started by Noble nine, right you guys manage it still is that very good? Yeah, we had original contributors were gitlab and Dinah Trace at the very beginning and then we added in Red Hat has been a big contributor to it and Sumo logic made a pretty significant.

Donation will say of a project called a slow gen, which is a whole Standalone project that connects opens slow to terraform. So it's great. Yeah, it's really really cool.

So, you know, we are definitely in the middle of it, but I would say from a governance perspective. It's a very, you know, open kind of discussion and we have a couple maintainers. It's it's not been very controversial to be honest.

It's been a very collaborative. No, I know that kind of project any thought about maybe bringing this to LFC and see if anything like that. It has been discussed.

I you know nothing to announce don't say anything. That's right. It's something you know, it's interesting.

When we look at these different open source governance, you know link Spanish. I was like, you know, someone involved in the cncf shall we say and I was on the governing board for a little bit and the you know, there's a trade off there in you know, in terms of the overhead, you know, and it's overhead in a good way, but then the exposure is also a really important thing. So the focus on open SLO is I think been on keeping it lightweight and Nimble getting it, you know, moving quickly.

We have a close collaboration with Dinah trace and they have a current proposal actually to build. Some additional tooling right openness as low as part of Captain which is the open source project that is actually is a cncf project. So, you know, we have we're dancing around the edges I guess on that topic, but as of right now we're focused on building stuff.

Excellent. I love it, you know kit the whole the whole SRE SLO thing, I think back to Like your years in Jay Park, right? I saw I read the book was out, but it had it really caught on yet.

You know what? I mean? It wasn't mainstream.

now I mean by every measure week. I can give you you know with our Google analytics and and everything else. SRE if devops's mainstream that's always a big mainstream part of it, right?

The new thing we're hearing a lot about I don't know how new it is the new name that's been given is platform engineering. Let me start off by saying. Sometimes I'm befuddled by the need for us to try to keep Reinventing new names for Ops.

Yeah, right. A lot of way that SRE does is very op-centric a good chunk of it. I think platform engineering is again Ops that you know, we've had new Option no Ops and this Ops and that Ops, but it's Ops.

but I I there's an article you and I discussed a little off-camera recently, you know devops is dead kind of long live platform engineering. and I took on bridge with that because I don't know maybe I'm old and cranky but just I mean pure rounded there in my mind. Either this is someone who's very young and new to the world of technology and doesn't understand cycles and how these things work.

Or just really Shameless PR hacking but let me tell you how I really feel so it's it's real leaving aside as maybe for a second the hype, you know, the even the Trope of you know, X's dad Long Live acts right is that you know the normal way. I think I used to run a platform, you know internal developer platform team at Microsoft. It was this search engine that no one's ever heard of called Bing and you know it was For me, I have a issue with kind of all of like you said the naming like naming is such a hard part of this.

It's important but it's not you know, it's not that important. But I I think there's a certain Affinity people get to it and they do want to have these names to reinvent things to your point. But look renaming Ops doesn't make it disappear.

You know what I mean? You can never sweep the Ops under the rug it's always there and it's somebody has to do, you know, somebody has to load the dishwasher, you know what I mean? Like in the house of software development the my point of view on the platform engineering and what I like about platform engineering and I I'm you know, obviously I've been involved the devops and S3 stuff forever, but the concept that I really like about platform engineering is ownership and I've always felt like this is the thing missing from devops and S3.

Discourse is what do you own? What are you responsible for and saying that we're responsible for operations? That's a fair a fair statement.

But you're it's not really a thing. That's like a to-do list. That's a that's a set of chores if Siri is responsible for reliability, right and if If the team is responsible for productivity and sort of like, you know, making sure that the ownership or that that you know, you build it you run at and that'll will put you in the right direction.

I think that those are all kind of noble ideas. The problem is if you're you know reporting to management, how do you demonstrate that? And I think if you if you imagine that there's this platform.

And I use the platform in the most broad kind of way internal developer platform Computing platform the ticketing system the knowledge know how run books all that stuff. That's a thing that exists and you can productize it internally, right? It can have product product characteristics to it and it's still performs devopsy stuff.

And by the way, it also has to have its own roadmap engineering up time Etc. So we're actually seeing ingredients back to you know me because it's all about me right like bring it back to open mind, right? We're running into platform engineering teams left and right and getting platform slos figured out is actually the first job.

We talk a lot about an srees. We'll talk a lot about Customer happiness and trying to set as slow as the application Level in practice you start with the platform because you say look if we can't get our Basics right compute storage, you know web hosting right? We can't get these basic things, right?

It doesn't really matter how you know, how what shade of blue the button is in the UI, you know what I mean? Like you kind of have no idea core figured out. So one of the things we're investing in quite heavily is how to make it just obvious and easy when you have a platform or you have you know, these well known tools that the slo's just come for free and you'll see more and more.

You know, I can't share too much but you'll be seeing more and more from us in the coming days and months about that about kind of how do you make it so that it's brain-dead easy to get the basics right? And then you can start to build the Nuance on top that I think a lot of you know, these platform teams are seeing this value and I've seen as read teams get moved to platform engineering but we also still I mean devops is everywhere. There's so many devops folks whether they're, you know have the title of devops and engineer or something else.

There's so many reliability engineers. Performance engineer security engineers and if they are if this platform engineering is a way to elevate the Ops work and show that it's something that's incredibly valuable this ownership, right? I own the platform and make it awesome for our company then I think that's good because the business is still confused.

I think this is really where a lot of this comes from is that you know, why do vendors have to keep coming with new terms because the business is confused, but what they're spending their money on and as long as that's the case, you know what I mean? You got to keep playing the show game one. Once we get past that hurdle then then everything's good and maybe platform engineering will be the one that sticks because the business will understand what the hell we're talking about.

You know what I mean? so look Jane, you know, let me let me let me Point Counterpoint. You here, please.

So a couple of things number one. I'm not against what platform engineering is doing. I'm not even against calling a platform engineering.

I just don't think that because that exists. That's sorry or devops ceases to exist. I couldn't agree more.

I think it's around one long Continuum. Yes. number two You know what the argument you just made?

And by the way, I wrote a not bed. On this and it was something along the lines of I don't care what you call it. Just don't call me late for dinner.

Right right and You know, we I went through a similar thing with the whole deaf SEC Ops. Why the heck do we got to put second in the middle of Devin Ops there is only one devops. It's devops right Security's in it.

Why do I got to put second in there? Now being from the security world. I knew that security people were sensitive.

That because their underlying approach to the whole devops thing is who are we kidding? We know these people don't give a s*** about security right developers don't care Ops people don't care where the only people who care about security and so by putting SEC right Deb in the middle of it. It was it was there you go.

There you go. We hear you. We love you.

We want you in here. We want you in here so much. We're putting sick right in the middle of it.

And and so we started calling it deaf secops and it caught on it's a thing I Who am I you know? Is that kind of what we're doing? He will play platform people we hear you.

We love your Ops people. I know some of this devops stuff is too death Centric. We we need to have Ops needs their thing.

Right, we gave you that sorry. Let's give you this platform engineering thing too because we want to just show really how important Ops is and if and and Folks up in the business class. You know or in the sea level that we got to kind of really simplify you wear the monies are and what you doing.

God bless you. And it is a bit of a shell game. underlying the underlying functionality the underlying roles the underlying Frameworks.

Will continue to evolve and we'll add to them a great put the way technology works. Because you do something new doesn't mean the old one dies. I agree.

I I am I think you and I are actually very much in alignment on this this particular Trend the the interesting thing to me right now. Okay, like let's put this in context the economy the the challenges the layoffs that we're seeing, you know, we when I look at this situation in the market. All of the vendors that are grasping to whatever terms, you know, they're all going to be trying to you know, figure out where the budget's gonna come from.

And what I what I think is really interesting, you know add in the other layer to this which is you got a bunch of people who were during the Great race the great resignation, right? They all went remote and they found houses out in you know, the boonies and right this is this is what everybody enjoyed and then, you know fast forward a year and it kind of everything fell off a cliff and now we're we're in a position where You know management teams are really asking a tough questions and they're they're putting more constraints on people and there's return to work and also their stuff. So what's interesting to me right now when we put it when we think about the devops SRE observability platform, whatever you want to call it world is that there's a lot of pressure to cut costs.

This is a lot of pressure and the worry that I have is how do you cut costs in a way that keeps you? up and running How do you write how do you have continuity with cost cutting and I think a lot of people who are going to take the approach of just looking at Cost cutting right without that context. So this is what we're doing with that.

So this is what slos are actually intended to do is that is to focus, right? The only way I know how to do this is you got to focus on what matters what are the things that are visible to customers what are things are critical to the business and you got to ignore everything else right? It's like the the Steve Jobs quote of like Focus isn't doing I'm going to butcher it but it's basically like Focus isn't just not doing things.

You don't want to do it's doing not doing things that you do want to do right things that you work great ideas that you still wanted to do. You have to not do them in order to focus and again, not that paraphrasing me Steve forgive me. Sorry.

Yeah. I'm very sorry, but it's it's close you can fix this and post anyway, so With the SLO approach you're saying okay. What is visible?

It's not about just oh we need to be five nines because I said so five nines is too expensive for your company. I'm sorry like we got it. We got to be more realistic.

So where can we get away with having less reliability and then let's cut the cost there. That means less Cloud compute. It means less people go focus on other things that are more important or free up the headcount and give it back, you know to to you know, the upstairs.

Anyway, that's that to me is the the context and hopefully people will be able to address this because I think this is the bigger, you know as much as we love in our in the tech world that are you know argue about naming it's like naming is the heart, you know, it's hard and one of the hard problems the software this this is the bigger context is the the business reality and economic reality. We're all facing right now. Yeah, we're definitely It's a different reality than it was during covid times for sure.

But it's also cyclical. I mean, you know kid you've been around I've been around longer these these Cycles they run their course, right and we live through them. Anyway, man.

Hey where we are about at a time, you know kid. I haven't had John a long time. I I hope to have you back here.

I'm gonna give you another well, I'm at Cube kind. I told you in Detroit if you're out there, but if not, come on soon. Let's let's get I know you guys have you working on some extra special top secret super stuff.

That's right, and we'll talk about it. Can't wait to see you all and thanks for having me. You know what?

We didn't tell people Noble nine. Where can they go get more information? com is the easiest place to go.

Also check out no conf, and no and obl number nine number nine like the Beatles song. All right. Okay.

We'll see you later, man. Be well. Take care, bye-bye.