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Back to the lesson libraryMECHANISM · 13 MIN
M33.7 CONNECT THE MECHANISM

Plan for traffic, failures, and ongoing resource use

Why does a server that's only 90% busy make people wait ten times longer than the work takes? Little's law, one queueing formula, and an error budget answer it.

LESSON OVERVIEW13 min lesson

Lesson overview

Why does a server that's only 90% busy make people wait ten times longer than the work takes? Little's law, one queueing formula, and an error budget answer it.

What you’ll explore

  • Plan capacity for an AI service using Little's law, the rise in waiting as utilization nears 1, SLOs with error budgets and burn rates, and headroom for failures and wasted work.
GO TO THE SOURCE

Original explanations, connected to the research.

A Proof for the Queuing Formula: L = λW (John D. C. Little, Operations Research, 1961)Google SRE Book, "Service Level Objectives"Google SRE Book, "Embracing Risk" (error budgets)Google SRE Workbook, "Alerting on SLOs" (burn rates)
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