Reliability Engineering on AWS: SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets Strategies

In modern distributed systems, 100% availability is the wrong target. Aiming for zero downtime inflates operational costs, slows release velocity, and creates brittle architectures.
This study session breaks down how Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles are implemented natively on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We explore how to define meaningful user-centric metrics, convert them into enforceable target objectives, manage error budgets to balance innovation with stability, and design intelligent auto scaling architectures that proactively mitigate capacity failures.

📅 Date: Saturday, July 25th, 2026
⏰ Time: 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM WAT
📍 Location: Virtual

Meet Our Speakers
🎤 Speaker: Samuel Joseph – DevOps Engineer
🎤 Moderator: Oluwayomi Adefemi – DevOps Engineer

🎯 What You Will Learn

1. The Core SRE Framework

• SLIs vs. SLOs vs. SLAs: Moving beyond basic server health metrics to user-centric telemetry (latency, error rates, saturation).
• Calculating & Managing Error Budgets: How to turn "allowable downtime" into an operational tool that balances new feature deployment against system stabilization.
• Burn Rate Alerting: Shifting from noisy, static alarms to burn-rate alerting that triggers before your entire budget is consumed.

2. Implementing Reliability Metrics Natively on AWS

• CloudWatch Application Signals & Synthetics: Setting up SLIs using CloudWatch metric math, custom canary runs, and distributed tracing.
• Automated Guardrails: Linking SLO thresholds to automated CI/CD deployment freezes or rollback mechanisms.

3. Proactive Auto Scaling for SLO Protection

• Target Tracking vs. Step Scaling: Designing auto-scaling policies aligned directly with request rates and tail latency (P95/P99).
• Predictive Scaling & Warm Pools: Harnessing AWS machine learning to pre-allocate capacity ahead of recurring traffic bursts and eliminating cold-start friction.
• Lifecycle Hooks & Connection Draining: Ensuring zero-downtime scale-in and scale-out events with ALB target group deregistration delays.