Joining Rely.io is very exciting and it comes with a great feeling of responsibility, since I will have the possibility to be an active contributor to the reliability intelligence evolution that Rely.io will lead!

A couple of years ago, I caught up with José Velez and we went through a very early pitch for Rely.io (or detech.ai, as it was named back then). At that time I was involved in launching a startup myself, which eventually ended up failing. José knew about it and thought I could help review some of the accelerator applications he was preparing. 

Listening to him, the mission was clear and ambitious: to make the internet more reliable, by helping customers deliver more resilient and performant services that meet or exceed user expectations. Admittedly, it was the first time I was hearing about Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and service-level objectives (SLOs)  but I realized the magnitude of what José had in mind — it was not just about selling a product, but transforming an industry.

Now two years later, I’ve been through professional experiences that allowed me to develop my skills, to think outside the box, and to leave my mark. However, in none of these past experiences was the company's vision of exponential growth like that of Rely.io. So, when I discussed with José the possibility of joining the team my enthusiasm was enormous and the decision was easy to make.

For the past 4 weeks I’ve been studying the world of SRE and Platform Engineering. Shout out to all the engineers and companies putting out so much great content out there! It’s amazing to understand the set of engineering practices, the number of people, and the technologies used to ensure we’re able to do certain things online that we take for granted. Public cloud, networking, CDNs, virtual machines, containers, databases, incident management processes, security, etc. — so many pieces that tie together and allow us to call an Uber or watch a show on Netflix.

I’ve also spent a lot of time learning about the problems our product tackles and the value we deliver to our customers. I’ll save you the long pitch here but I’ll encourage you to read our blog What Are The Benefits of Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)? Don’t think of SLOs as just another KPI or Rely.io as just another dashboard. This approach drives an organizational change and forces teams to always work backwards from (internal or external) customers when thinking about reliability. It is used by Google, Meta, or Salesforce to improve the reliability and observability of their complex distributed systems. However, these companies have hundreds of engineers building custom tools for this purpose. Our vision is to deliver the same kind of reliability superpowers as a simple and elegant SaaS platform, something any engineer could easily build into their monitoring & observability stack.

My goals here at Rely.io are very ambitious. I’m looking forward to connecting with engineering teams around the world and helping them use Rely.io to build and maintain reliable software, without compromising on development speed or engineers’ wellbeing. Ultimately, my responsibility is not just to promote a product, but to be an active contributor to the reliability engineering community that Rely.io is part of.

If you’d like to learn more about Rely.io and our beta program, please reach out:
diogo [at] rely.io