Werk 15 — who carries it
Availability and latency are promises, and a promise with no budget attached is a hope. This werk states the promise in numbers, spends against it deliberately, and enforces it in the pipeline instead of in the post-mortem.
The offer
A production estate with stated service levels, an error budget that has teeth, and response-time regressions caught before a release rather than by a customer.
Availability and latency targets set with the business rather than inherited from a dashboard, with the escalation and release-freeze rule that gives an error budget consequence.
Response-time thresholds enforced as a build gate, load and soak tests run against a representative dataset, and the regression traced to the change that caused it.
Peak-load modelling, headroom stated in numbers, and the scaling behaviour proven under failure before the event that needs it.
Signals that answer "is it the user's experience" rather than "is the box alive", plus the on-call and post-incident routine that turns outages into fixed causes.
Reliability baseline, SLO proposal, load-test findings, prioritised plan.
SLO set, error-budget policy, arbitration on headroom spend.
The practice stood up and the service level held through change.
State of the proof
Experiences that prove it
Sub-capabilities and evidence
Publishable figures
Questions
- Why hold performance next to cost?
- Because headroom is bought twice — in the invoice and in the footprint. An SLO with no cost owner produces over-provisioning; a cost programme with no SLO produces outages. The trade-off is argued once, in the open, by someone accountable for both.
- Where is the real proof?
- In the PMU replatforming, where a five-nines 99.995% uptime target held on a live betting platform while total cost of ownership fell 87% — the service level was the constraint the cost work had to respect.
- What is honestly not published?
- Standalone performance engagements. Response-time, capacity and observability work is held by named operators and carried inside delivery and migration mandates; there is no published case sold as performance work on its own.
- Is this the same as platform engineering?
- No. Platform engineering builds the paved road; this werk is accountable for how fast it is and whether it stays up. They are frequently bought together and they answer to different numbers.