Air Budget - A Good Communication Tool

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Air budget is actually not a technical term, right? Its a communications frame work. Your slow target tells others, here's how reliable we want to be. And your air budget let's you tell other people, here'sHow reliable we've been. So when you're able to go to someone and say, all right, we were uneliable for 17 minutes last quarter, but that means we still had a budget left of 24 minutes. Although umbeliability periods are not always all in a row. They're not always about down time theyr, not always byoutages. But the point is it gives you a more human friendly way of communicating these kind of historical reports.

“Reliability is the most important thing. Your users define your reliability, so make sure you’re measuring the right thing. And 100% is out of the question, so pick the right target."

Alex Hidalgo is the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and author of “Implementing Service Level Objectives”. In this episode, we discussed the practical guide on how to implement SRE and SLOs. Alex started by explaining the basic concept of service reliability and service truths. He then explained the concept of reliability stack, that includes the famous SRE concepts: SLI, SLO, and error budgets. Alex then shared his insights on how we can define a service reliability target, why a higher reliability target is expensive, and the risk of a service of being too reliable. Towards the end, Alex shared his tips on how we can build an SRE culture and how we can use the error budget as a communication tool within the organization.

Listen out for:

Career Journey - [00:07:19]
Understanding SRE & SLO - [00:14:17]
Service & Reliability - [00:17:30]
Service Truths - [00:21:06]
Reliability Stack - [00:23:45]
Defining Reliability Target - [00:27:11]
Higher Reliability is Expensive - [00:29:27]
SLI - [00:34:26]
Measuring Correctness - [00:37:30]
Critical User Journey - [00:41:49]
Being Too Reliable - [00:47:18]
Communicating with Error Budget - [00:51:02]
Building SRE Culture - [00:54:13]
3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:57:57]

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Alex Hidalgo’s Bio
Alex Hidalgo is the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and author of “Implementing Service Level Objectives”. During his career he has developed a deep love for sustainable operations, proper observability, and using SLO data to drive discussions and make decisions. Alex’s previous jobs have included IT support, network security, restaurant work, t-shirt design, and hosting game shows at bars. When not sharing his passion for technology with others, you can find him scuba diving or watching college basketball. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner Jen and a rescue dog named Taco. Alex has a BA in philosophy from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Follow Alex:

Twitter – @ahidalgosre
Nobl9 – https://www.nobl9.com/
Website – https://www.alex-hidalgo.com/

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/96.