Alex Hidalgo is a principal site reliability engineer at Nobl9, makers of a robust service level objective (SLO) platform for SREs. Prior to this role, Alex worked as a senior site reliability engineer at Squarespace and a senior site reliability engineer at Google. He’s also the author of the O’Reilly book Implementing Service Level Objectives, which was released in September 2020. In 2001, Alex restored a 1964.5 Mustang for money. Join Corey and Alex as they discuss the pros and cons of writing a book, what exactly a service-level objective is, the difference between a service-level objective and a service-level agreement, how implementing SLOs is all about finding the perfect balance of failure your users are willing to tolerate, how reliability for an SRE is defined by SLOs, what the moment was like when Alex realized he was going to write a book, how it’s difficult to bring up the fact that you’ve written a book in conversation, and more.