97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 81. Bytes per User Value

Arshia Mufti

Stripe

I remember a time during which we were growing steadily as a business, but the systems teams that supported our product stayed stagnant and overloaded, and its arguments for increasing head count fell sort of flat. Our leaders didn’t understand that our teams needed more people. As far as they were concerned; business was growing, and the areas that deserved investment were not systems teams but product teams that needed to build new features, sales teams that needed to onboard new users, field engineering teams that had to help developers integrate with our API. There was a serious lack in our ability of our systems teams to speak the language of our users and stakeholders. We didn’t know how to stitch together stories that involved both end users and the foundational systems that they depended on.

So instead of starting with ourselves, we started with those end users. We pulled data on user growth and asked ourselves how we could demonstrate that investment in our infrastructure is inherently correlated with the growth of our business.

From there, we were able to tell a story of how growth in a user’s business brought with it an increase in API volume, which in turn put a proportional burden on our infrastructure. Instead of showing that we were scaling up servers more frequently than we did before, we quantified how much ...