Let’s say I’m RobinHood. Let’s pick an SLO. I think three nines monthly SLO is a good start, that budgets ~45 minutes of down time per month. Maybe I can argue for a more aggressive SLO, but let’s pick this one - because I think it will keep users relatively happy as trades aren’t blocked for more than an hour at worst. I drive an agreement with stakeholders that if we needle out of this SLO, we drop all feature work and focus on hardening reliability.

RobinHood was out for a whole day. This is unacceptable. It points to a complete organizational fuck up - product and feature development have too much power and priority at the expense of reliability.

I’m not sure that RobinHood has ever heard of SLOs or reliability engineering. I really hope their leadership is smart enough to hire and empower the right people that will drive organizational change.