Superior Reliability

Keep critical user outcomes dependable under expected failures and recoverable after exceptional ones. Base reliability work on explicit service objectives, real failure domains, and operational ownership rather than adding retries, circuit breakers, or redundancy by checklist.

Define the reliability contract

Before proposing controls, establish:

• critical user journeys and the service or component boundaries that support them;
• acceptable availability, correctness, latency, freshness, and durability;
• traffic and workload shape, peak conditions, and dependency budgets;
• failure domains, shared dependencies, state ownership, and blast radius;
• SLI/SLO, error budget, RTO, RPO, retention, or contractual targets that actually exist;
• detection, response, escalation, recovery, and decision owners;
• evidence from incidents, telemetry, capacity tests, architecture, and runbooks.

Do not invent numerical objectives because a template expects them. When no objective is accepted, state a provisional risk question and gather evidence before designing a complex control.

Choose work from risk and objective