Poll three Site Reliability Engineers with the question “What is SRE?” and you’re likely to get five different answers: an implementation of DevOps, a role, a set of practices, a cultural shift, a snazzy title. While these definitions may not necessarily align with those in the SRE books, there is one throughline differentiating SRE from other ways of working: Service Level Objectives (SLOs). While simple to understand – intentionally! – SLOs are frequently challenging to define in practice. And even though the specifics of an SLO vary across industries and verticals, we have found there are a number of practices and strategies common amongst teams that have successfully implemented SLOs for their workloads. 

Bringing together product, development, and SRE teams to achieve a common understanding of the workload in question, and in particular its critical user journeys (CUJ), is a key first step. For many teams this means writing down, often for the first time, detailed sequence or flow diagrams for these CUJs. The maturity of and the relationship between the three “legs of the stool” (development, product, and SRE) will play a role in the level of effort required to complete this first step of the journey. Having a common understanding of your users’ expectations of your workload is a prerequisite to writing effective SLOs.

While modeling user journeys and decomposing them into SLOs is an art and no two applications are alike, there are a few key aspects upon which to anchor your discussion. The main question we recommend you keep top-of-mind when going through this process is “What do my users care about?” Framing your thought process in this way prevents implementation snafus and strategies that don’t approximate user expectations. Other aspects to consider include:

• Are there breakpoints where the user may choose not to take an action?
• Which parts of the interaction are we capable of measuring and which are we not (e.g., third-party dependencies)?
• Which parts of the user journey are common across many user journeys and thus are possible candidates for factoring out as their own CUJ (example: login)?
• Which parts of the journey can be measured in aggregate, and which must be separated because of differences in criticality, request rates, or other factors?
• Which steps of the journey have strict dependencies between one another?

Armed with answers to these questions, a detailed request diagram, and your application code, you’re ready to start putting pen to paper! Before jumping into your monitoring consoles, we recommend writing up an SLO design document which lays out the technical details of your chosen SLOs. We’ve made a template available to you to jump start this process (if you have a Google account, you can make a copy using this link). In it, you’ll find an empty template along with worked examples for reference as you create your own specifications. Whether you use this template or not, we recommend the following as you document your SLOs:

• Be pedantic with technical specifications – they will matter during implementation
• Maintain a section outlining clarifications, caveats, and/or tradeoffs made as a part of the design process
• Consider where you’re measuring – make sure it’s feasible
• Beware of summaries, averages, and other non-aggregatable statistics for latency SLOs
• Keep compliance periods consistent across your workload(s)

• We recommend the following defaults:
  • 28 days rolling for operational needs (error budget alerting)
  • Fixed calendar quarters for prioritization and lookback
• Changelog: Include one, even if your documentation tool has version history, so you can track major changes
• Put your SLO documentation in a location accessible by your team and company stakeholders
• Once your SLO PRD is finalized, treat your implementation as code and store it in your version control system
  • Remember – DRY!

We hope these recommendations and template give you a head start in bringing your SLOs to production. If you find yourself in need of a tool to implement your SLOs, consider Google Cloud SLO Monitoring which allows you to create SLOs for any metric available in Google Cloud Monitoring and computes your error budget automatically, enabling burn rate-based alerting. If this process still feels daunting or you find your team in need of help with any of the above, our reliability engineering professional services team can assist. For more information, visit cloud.google.com/sre or you can contact your Google Cloud account team.

Many executives across the globe are feeling the effects of a recent pivot to hybrid work models. This massive transition represents a significant departure from existing office culture. As business leaders look to operationalize their flexible work model infrastructure, they’re also evaluating what it takes to attract and retain employees in this new landscape. Instead of seeing these as separate initiatives, business leaders have a unique opportunity to collectively overhaul corporate culture, focusing on hybrid work and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies in tandem.

Combining DEI and hybrid work strategies provides a more inclusive culture

Focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn’t mean business leaders are offering an underrepresented individual a specific role or platform because they fit a certain demographic category. Lack of job quality criteria leads to animosity and cultural inequality. Here, diversity means creating a meritocracy with equal pay and equal opportunity for all.

Organizations that thoughtfully combine DEI and hybrid work strategies will produce cultures that improve employee experience and business agility. Integrated DEI and hybrid workplace support better business outcomes by:

Increasing the total available talent pool. A business must cast a wide net for candidates by expanding how and where it searches. Adding a flexible work schedule policy expands potential talent by allowing parents, caregivers, and others to select the hours that work best for their family obligations. Remote work also holds a higher priority in job seekers’ desires. For example, a FlexJobs survey revealed that 24% of workers say the ability to work from home is so important to them that they are willing to take a 10-20% pay cut to work remotely, and 21% would give up some vacation time.

Creating a more inclusive culture. Job seekers want to work for companies that prioritize DEI. According to a recent CNBC and SurveyMonkey Workforce survey, nearly 80% of workers say that they want to work for a company that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. A DEI-centric work culture allows job seekers to feel like there’s a place for them.

Fostering innovation and profitability with broader perspectives. In general, diversity and inclusion promotes the expression of ideas from people with different backgrounds, leading to breakthroughs in creativity, innovation, and attracting new customers. Workplace DEI programs create an employee base that closely mirrors a customer base. A diverse team is less likely to miss potential market opportunities if representative of a broad range of ethnicity, race, age, assigned sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds. A 2020 McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.

Hybrid work should not derail DEI efforts

While there are numerous benefits to integrating DEI and hybrid work strategies, it would be naive to think it won’t bring challenges. Businesses run the risk of creating new inequities and exacerbating existing ones as they move to hybrid models. One potential issue lies in which employees can work remotely. An HBR article shared how pre-Covid less than 30% of all workers could work from home; only 16% of Latinx workers and 19% of Black workers had remote flexibility, compared to 37% of Asian workers and 30% of white workers.

Even for employees who can work remotely, it’s essential to eliminate “proximity bias.” A study by SHRM found that 67% of surveyed supervisors admitted to considering remote workers more easily replaceable than onsite workers at their organization. Additionally, 72% said they would prefer all of their teams to be working in the office.

A successful hybrid environment strikes a balance between flexibility and inclusivity where individuals feel valued, and everyone has equal opportunities for advancement. In another study, researchers concluded that remote workers and office workers were promoted at the same rate, but found that remote workers’ salaries grew more slowly. Leading companies recognize that physically being at the office full-time isn’t necessary to produce great results.

8 steps to creating a diverse hybrid work culture

As DEI becomes a new business imperative, organizations must work to minimize unconscious bias, creating market-based salaries for all workers, and introducing educational programs that support talent development. Here are some concrete steps you can take to get started.

• Educate current and future leaders on DEI and hybrid work issues. As you build hybrid work strategies, it’s crucial to discover and understand unconscious biases. According to Deloitte, companies need a holistic DEI learning strategy, including unconscious bias training and developing the conditions for long-term behavior changes.
• Embrace tools that support DEI and hybrid workplaces. Organizations can leverage technology and AI-enabled HR software to support their efforts. Collaboration tools provide everyone with a voice regardless of where they are (for example, using Spaces for team chats in Google Workspace so that everyone has access to the same information). Video call features such as transcriptions and translation can help the hearing-and-vision-impaired and employees who speak different languages. It’s also possible to purchase recruiting solutions with AI technology to reduce the chance of bias or discrimination when reviewing candidates.
• Strengthen culture by marrying DEI with meritocracy. There should also be explicit guidelines to ensure the systems and processes for hiring and promoting individuals are both transparent and equitable. One method for accomplishing this goal is to define detailed job requirements and metrics per role to understand what skills are associated with specific functions. It’s also essential to ensure you’ve designed these processes in a way that screens out bias. Leading companies will deploy analytics tools to evaluate the systems’ fairness and track if the systems are progressing against diversity targets.
• Create upskilling programs to train employees. Many organizations struggle to find talent with the right skill sets. One solution to this problem is to invest in educating existing employees. Companies must develop diverse talent at every level to create a pipeline of candidates that progresses into senior management. Similar to the way companies offered management training programs to college graduates, organizations should design programs that provide skills enhancement for entry and mid-level employees. Almost every job will require a certain level of technical skill—organizations must upskill existing talent.
• Restructure compensation before employees leave. It’s easier to retain an employee than to onboard and train a new hire. According to the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s wage growth tracker, wages for people who have switched jobs have outpaced those who’ve stayed at one employer since 2011. One way to retain talent is to right-size salaries to a competitive market rate.
• Remember that money isn’t everything. While individuals may switch jobs for money, they often stay in a position for the culture. Creating a leading employee experience helps organizations keep talent. Work from home programs, flexible work schedules, and advanced programs such as childcare benefits help build the foundation. But increasingly, individuals are looking for a sense of belonging. According to research from McKinsey, employees who feel included are three times more likely to report being excited about working for their organization and committed to its success. Another McKinsey report focusing on attrition shows that employees primarily leave companies because they don’t feel valued or don’t have a sense of belonging.
• Don’t forget to commit the resources. Most organizations built their cultures before DEI and hybrid work were requirements. These companies must invest in new work tools and educational programs, and create new hiring and talent management practices. A business can make a more significant impact with fewer resources by ensuring purchases and processes support flexible and inclusive work cultures.
• Make sure actions are backed up with DEI transparency measurements. The pressure to support DEI could lead to situations where activities are celebrated over results. While it’s not easy to be vulnerable and transparent about where the problems exist, employers should take stock of where they are today. They should present this authentically, create goals for the future, and design a measurable action plan to track its progress. With so many variables and unknowns, it’s crucial for talent leaders to track the way that hybrid work and DEI efforts advance.

Diversity should be part of your efforts because it’s the culture you want to create. However, ignoring diversity efforts can also come with ramifications. For example, Goldman Sachs announced in 2021 that the firm would only underwrite IPOs in the United States and Europe for companies with at least two diverse board members. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules this summer that require Nasdaq-listed companies to have at least two diverse directors – including one woman and at least one member of an underrepresented community.

In order for the benefits of diversity to emerge in the workplace, companies need to enact cultural and behavioral change. As stated in the ICSM report, “Never become too comfortable with your efforts, as there is always room for improvement with diversity at your organization, whether you see it or not.” It’s clear that what organizations have done to attract talent in the past isn’t resonating the same way today. A diverse workforce delivers better ideas and stronger communities, building deeper relationships with customers along the way. Moving forward, it’s expected that a company’s investment in a diverse, inclusive, and hybrid work culture will set it apart from its competition, leading to increased business agility and better financial outcomes.

About Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital

Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital specializes in treating eye conditions such as cataracts; glaucoma; corneal problems such as ulcers, inflammation, and thinning; and retinal issues such as degeneration and detachment. The business operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.

Industries: Health & Social Care

Location: India

Founded by the late Dr. J. Agarwal, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, headquartered in Chennai, India, operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.

According to Dilip Ramadasan, GM-IT, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, the business is the second-largest network of eye-care hospitals globally and aims to provide the best eye care in the world.

“We have focused on service over the last couple of years and decided to completely revamp back-end operations such as information technology and finance,” says Dilip.

“Realizing our vision involved moving to a completely new infrastructure that could deliver the scalability, agility, and performance our evolving application stack required.”

Replacing Aging Desktop Hardware and Applications

The business placed particular emphasis on upgrading its aging desktop fleet and traditional productivity applications.

“When I arrived in 2015, we only had 35 hospitals and all of them were using desktops that were five years or older,” Dilip says. “These desktops were due for replacement within the following six months to a year, so I had an ideal opportunity to upgrade our capabilities and address issues such as excessive support costs and resource requirements.”

For example, if a desktop at a hospital in a remote location experienced a problem, Dilip had to dispatch one of his technology team members to fix the issue. This could take up to five days, while the employee whose desktop was underperforming or failing often needed to wait until the fix was applied before resuming work.

Three Criteria for Improvement

When evaluating options to enhance the hospital’s information technology environment, Dilip applied three criteria: increasing revenue, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs.

Dilip elected to replace the traditional desktops and applications with Chromebase devices running Google Chrome and G Suite applications. “This option aligned perfectly with our efficiency and cost criteria,” he says.

The business started a four-month pilot of Chromebase devices with G Suite in October 2015 at four newly-opened hospitals.

“We wanted to see how users would react to the Chromebases running G Suite compared to the traditional desktops and applications,” he adds. “A large component of the project entailed educating users about the benefits of G Suite applications such as Google Docs and Sheets.”

Chromebases Running G Suite Deployed to 600 Users

Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has completed the deployment of Chromebases running G Suite to 600 users. This group comprised team members who needed to access a billing application or a human resources management system and doctors who needed to access patients’electronic medical records.

“My desktop total cost of ownership fell by up to 70% when I deployed these devices,” Dilip says.

With G Suite running on Chromebase devices, Dilip has been able to resolve many desktop support issues remotely, minimizing the need to send support team members to distant locations.

“The number of support tickets we used to process on the desktop computing side has fallen by a full 80%,” he says. “As a result, I’ve been able to cut the number of desktop support team members from eight to three and redeploy them to server and application management and support.”

Dilip cites Sheets and Google Drive as the G Suite applications most beneficial to the business.

Sheets enables hospital team members to share important cost and revenue numbers without having to attach multiple versions of spreadsheets to emails, while Google Drive facilitates collaboration by enabling the team members to store and view shared documents.

“Team members are able to spend more time on core activities rather than on picking up numbers and sharing them with regional managers,” Dilip says.

The business also uses Google Vault to protect management data held in emails and help ensure compliance with legislative requirements.

Google Cloud Platform Products Under Evaluation

Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital is evaluating extending its deployment of Google Cloud Platform products to Google BigQuery and Google Data Studio.

“We are looking to add a business intelligence layer over applications running in other cloud environments, and Google potentially provides an option to do that,” Dilip says.

“This layer would enable us to analyze electronic medical record data to increase our understanding of patterns such as how a particular disease affects an individual across various stages of life and what types of interventions would deliver the best results.”

“Google has introduced the flexibility we need to reposition our engineers as needed, improved the relationship between the information technology team and operations teams, and given the information technology team greater confidence in resolving issues,” adds Dilip. “We will be continuing to scout for opportunities across Google platforms to increase our revenue and efficiencies while decreasing our costs.”

Data continues to grow in volume and is increasingly distributed across lakes, warehouses, clouds, and file formats. As more users demand more use cases, the traditional approach to build data movement infrastructure is proving difficult to scale. Unlocking the full potential of data requires breaking down these silos, and is increasingly a top priority for enterprises.

Earlier this year, we previewed BigLake, a storage engine that extends innovations in BigQuery storage to open file formats running on public cloud object stores. This allows customers to build secure multi-cloud data lakes over open file formats. BigLake provides consistent, fine-grained security controls for Google Cloud and open-source query engines to interact with data. Today, we are excited to announce General Availability for BigLake, and a set of new capabilities to help you build a differentiated data platform.

“We are using GCP to build and extend one of the street’s largest risk systems. During several tests we have seen the great potential and scale of BigLake. It is one of the products that could support our cloud journey and drive application’s future efficiency” – Scott Condit, Director, Risk CTO Deutsche Bank.

Build a distributed data lake that spans across warehouses, object stores & clouds with BigLake

Customers can create BigLake tables on Google Cloud Storage (GCS), Amazon S3 and ADLS Gen 2 over supported open file formats, such as Parquet, ORC and Avro. BigLake tables are a new type of external table that can be managed similar to data warehouse tables. Administrators do not need to grant end users access to files in object stores, but instead manage access at a table, row or a column level. These tables can be created from a query engine of your choice, such as BigQuery or open-source engines using the BigLake connector. Once these tables are created, BigLake and BigQuery tables can be centrally discovered in the data catalog and managed at scale using Dataplex.

BigLake extends the BigQuery storage API to object stores to help you build a multi-compute architecture. BigLake connectors are built on the BigQuery storage API and enable Google Cloud DataFlow and open-source query engines (such as Spark, Trino, Presto, Hive) to query BigLake tables by enforcing security. This eliminates the need to move the data to a query engine specific use case and security only needs to be configured at one place and is enforced everywhere.

“We are using GCP to design datalake solutions for our customers and transform their digital strategy to create a data-driven enterprise. Biglake has been critical for our customers to quickly realize the value of analytical solutions by reducing the need to build ETL pipelines and cutting-down time-to-market. The performance & governance features of BigLake enabled a variety of data lake use cases for our customers.” – Sureet Bhurat, Founding Board member – Synapse LLC

BigLake unlocks new use cases using Google Cloud and OSS Query engines

During the preview, we saw a large number of customers use BigLake in various ways. Some of the top use cases include:

Building secure and governed data lakes for open-source workloads – Workloads migrating from Hadoop, Spark first customers, or those using Presto/Trino, can now use BigLake to build secure, governed and performant data lakes on GCS. BigLake tables on GCS provide fine-grained security, table management (vs giving access to files), better query performance and integrated governance with Dataplex. These characteristics are accessible across multiple OSS query engines when using the BigLake connectors.

“To support our data driven organization, Wizard needs a data lake solution that leverages open file formats and can grow to meet our needs. BigLake allows us to build and query on open file formats, scales to meet our needs, and accelerates our insight discovery. We look forward to expanding our use cases with future BigLake features” – Rich Archer, Senior Data Engineer – Wizard

Eliminate or reduce data duplication across data warehouses and lakes – Customers who use GCS, and BigQuery managed storage had to previously create two copies of data to support users using BigQuery and OSS engines. BigLake makes the GCS tables more consistent with BigQuery tables, reducing the need to duplicate data. Instead, customers can now keep a single copy of data split across BigQuery storage and GCS, and data can be accessed by BigQuery or OSS engines in either places in a consistent, secure manner.

Fine-grained security for multi-cloud use cases – BigQuery Omni customers can now use BigLake tables on Amazon S3, and ADLS Gen 2 to configure fine grained security access control, and take advantage of localized data processing, and cross cloud transfer capabilities to do multi-cloud analytics. Tables created on other clouds are centrally discoverable on Data catalog for ease of management & governance

Interoperability between analytics and data science workloads – Data science workloads, using either Spark or Vertex AI notebooks can now directly access data in BigQuery or GCS through the API connector, enforcing security & eliminating the need to import data for training models. For BigQuery customers, these models can be imported back into BigQuery ML to produce inferences.

Build a differentiated data platform with new BigLake capabilities

We are also excited to announce new capabilities as part of this General Availability launch. These include:

• Analytics Hub support: Customers can now share BigLake tables on GCS with partners, vendors or suppliers as linked data sets. Consumers can access this data in place through the preferred query engine of their choice (BigQuery, Spark, Presto, Trino, Tensorflow).
• BigLake tables is now the default table type BigQuery Omni, and has been upgraded from the previous default of external tables.
• BigQuery ML support: BigQuery customers can now train their models on GCS BigLake tables using BigQuery ML, without needing to import data, and accessing the data in accordance to the access policies on the table.
• Performance acceleration (preview): Queries for GCS BigLake tables can now be accelerated using the underlying BigQuery infrastructure. If you would like to use this feature please get in touch with your account team or fill out this form.
• Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) profiling support (coming soon): Cloud DLP can soon scan BigLake tables to identify and protect sensitive data at scale. If you would like to use this feature please get in touch with your account team.
• Data masking and audit logging (Coming soon): BigLake tables now support dynamic data masking, enabling you to mask sensitive data elements to meet compliance needs. End user query requests to GCS for BigLake tables are now audit logged and are available to query via logs.

Next steps

Refer to BigLake documentation to learn more, or get started with this quick start tutorial. If you are already using external tables today, consider upgrading them to BigLake tables to take advantage of above mentioned new features. For more information, reach out to the Google cloud account team to see how BigLake can add value to your data platform.