How SRE Teams Use Service Level Objectives to Drive Daily Decisions

This episode explores how Site Reliability Engineering teams use Service Level Objectives (SLOs) not just as a quarterly dashboard metric, but as a real-time decision-making tool that shapes pager rotations, deployment gating, and incident prioritization. Lucas walks through how Shopify's SRE team used a 99.95% availability SLO to flag a critical degradations before it became a full outage in 2025. Luna pushes back on whether SLOs can become a bureaucratic checkbox, and the two debate how to keep SLOs actionable without adding overhead. The hosts also briefly discuss listener support: if you value an ad-free tech podcast, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. #SLO #SRE #ServiceLevelObjectives #SiteReliabilityEngineering #Shopify #Reliability #IncidentResponse #Uptime #ProductionEngineering #DevOps #Observability #SLI #ErrorBudget #DeploymentGating #PagerDuty #TechPodcast #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo