Did you know API traffic for Apigee customers increased 46% year-over-year, to 2.21 trillion calls, between 2019 and 2020? If you have more questions on APIs trends and their role in disrupting enterprises digitally, you can catch up on key take aways from the Google Cloud’s State of API Economy 2021 report and insights from Google’s experts on API-best practices.

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.

We’re dedicated to creating products that are helpful for our users, including those in a business setting. G Suite helps companies of all sizes transform how they work by encouraging people to focus on what really matters, whether that be fostering a culture of collaboration like Iron Mountain or reducing IT and infrastructure costs like Nielsen. 

Here’s how Google’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) can help people accomplish more in the workplace. First, Google Docs is packed with more assistive features to help you create high-quality work more quickly. In addition, the Google Assistant has been helping people get things done in their personal lives for the past few years. With remote working becoming the norm these days, Google Assistant has more features to help G Suite users work more efficiently and seamlessly. 

Assistive writing features in Google Docs
AI-powered capabilities within Docs makes it faster and easier for people to create high-quality, error-free content. 

• Write faster. Smart Compose in Google Docs uses Google AI to suggest complete sentences as they are created. Smart Compose has already saved people from typing more than 2 billion characters each week.
• Cut back on grammatical and spelling errors. To build on the intelligence, Docs is using cutting-edge, neural network technology to power grammar suggestions. The neural network approach has proven to help individuals catch even more errors in internal experiments. In addition, we’ve brought spelling autocorrect to Docs. Using the power of Google Search, this intelligent feature constantly learns new words or phrases that become part of the English language from search to inform spelling suggestions in documents, just as it does already in Gmail.
• Receive suggestions that are tailored to your business. Lastly, our machine-learning based spelling suggestions to recognize commonly used words from your business domain to inform recommendations is also a useful feature. For example, if your organization has an internal project name or acronym that’s commonly used, Docs will not only stop underlining such terms, but will also suggest corrections when these terms are misspelled. 

Expanding the power of the Google Assistant for G Suite Businesses
You can accomplish more on the go with the Google Assistant when you’re logged into your G Suite account. We’ve also enabled remote workers with the Asus Hangouts Meet Hardware kit to respond to voice commands in meeting rooms.

• Manage your calendar while on the move. Whether you’re on your commute home or on the go between meetings, the Google Assistant can help you manage scheduling in Google Calendar. You can ask the Assistant to read your calendar, create events, cancel events, or even reschedule events.
• Send quick messages and dial into calls hands-free. Beyond managing your calendar, we know that sometimes you need to send messages and join calls on the go. You can say things like, “Hey Google, join my next meeting” or “Hey Google, send an email to my next meeting”.
• Have a more seamless meeting experience. Google Assistant is available in meeting rooms with Asus Hangouts Meet Hardware kit. Instead of clicking into meetings to join them, people can say voice commands to the Assistant to join a meeting, exit a meeting, or even make a phone call.
• Increase accessibility in meeting rooms. Another goal in bringing the Google Assistant into meeting rooms is to increase accessibility. People can say a voice command, like “Hey, Google, turn on spoken feedback,” to use accessibility features without having to find the button to turn them on.