Reliability Design

Build systems that anticipate failures, degrade gracefully, and recover automatically. Design for MTBF and MTTR trade-offs.

Context

You are designing for reliability. The user faces uptime requirements, wants to reduce MTTR, or needs to design disaster recovery. Read their current SLAs and failure modes.

Domain Context

Based on Nygard's Release It! and Google's SRE practices:

• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures): How long before next failure? Increase by building fault-tolerant systems
• MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery): How long to recover? Decrease by automating recovery and alerting
• Graceful Degradation: When components fail, reduce functionality rather than crashing entirely
• Fault Isolation: Failures contained to one component; don't cascade
• Observability: Can you see problems before users do? Metrics, logs, traces for every critical path

Instructions