GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech Reliability Engineering Mindset • Alex Ewerlöf & Charity Majors
Dec 2, 2025
In this engaging discussion, Alex Ewerlöf, a Senior Staff Engineer at Volvo Cars and reliability engineering author, shares his journey from product engineering to the challenges of implementing Google's SRE practices. He highlights the gap between theoretical frameworks and real-world limitations, discussing the importance of aligning SLIs with business impact and the critical role of SLOs in setting expectations. Alex warns against cookie-cutter SLIs and emphasizes the need for tailored approaches based on service criticality, making reliability a strategic conversation in engineering.
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Unexpected Path To SRE
- Alex described being a frontend dev suddenly given admin access and becoming an accidental SRE after company reorganizations removed specialized roles.
- That rapid trust and responsibility forced engineers to own production and learn reliability practices on the fly.
Scale SLO Education With Docs And Tools
- Alex wrote his book to scale SLI/SLO language across hundreds of teams when face-to-face workshops were impossible.
- Use clear documentation and visual tools to teach SLIs and SLOs at organizational scale.
Google SRE Is A High-End Recipe
- Alex compares Google's SRE books to Michelin recipes that most companies can't follow due to different resources and context.
- He argues most organizations must build platforms and tooling before true SRE is feasible.
