Reliability Engineering Mindset • Alex Ewerlöf & Charity Majors

GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.
http://gotopia.tech/bookclub

Alex Ewerlöf - Senior Staff Engineer at Volvo Cars & Author of "Reliability Engineering Mindset"
Charity Majors - Co-Founder & CTO of honeycomb.io & Co-Author of "Observability Engineering"
RESOURCES
Alex
https://bsky.app/profile/alexewerlof.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexewerlof
https://www.alexewerlof.com

Charity
https://twitter.com/mipsytipsy
https://linkedin.com/in/charity-majors
https://charity.wtf
https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/slos-are-the-api-for-your-engineering-team

DESCRIPTION
Alex Ewerlöf shares his journey from product engineering to reliability engineering and discusses the practical challenges of implementing Google's SRE practices in real-world companies.
He emphasizes the significant gap between Google's idealized SRE approach — which he links to "a fantastic chef's recipe for Michelin-starred restaurants" — and the reality most companies face with limited resources and infrastructure. The discussion covers key topics including the evolution from traditional operations to where engineers own their code in production, the critical importance of choosing SLIs that align with business impact, and how SLOs help set expectations and help the service consumers prepare non-functional requirements.

Alex coined the law of 10x per 9 highlighting that reliability isn't free and requires careful cost-benefit analysis.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Alex Ewerlöf • Reliability Engineering Mindset • https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/rem
C. Majors, L. Fong-Jones & G. Miranda • Observability Eng. • https://amzn.to/38scbma
C. Majors & L. Campbell • Database Reliability Eng. • https://amzn.to/3ujybdS
Alex Hidalgo • Implementing Service Level Objectives • https://amzn.to/4pbWJxw
Brian Klaas • Fluke • https://amzn.to/41V1Cko
Simler & Hanson • The Elephant in the Brain • https://amzn.to/4fYCG1i

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Kapitler

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. The serendipitous path to SRE (00:01:38)

3. From SRE to author (00:05:19)

4. The Google SRE gap (00:07:52)

5. Making Service Level Objectives (SLO) practical (00:11:12)

6. The future of observability & SLOs (00:20:26)

7. Swapping stories on recent reads (00:23:54)

8. Outro (00:25:50)