Reliability Model
Reliability Engineering
SRE-inspired operations with service level objectives, error budgets, proactive monitoring, blameless incident reviews, and continuous improvement.
Discuss Reliability RequirementsUnderstanding Service Levels
We distinguish between service level indicators, objectives, and agreements. This clarity drives how we operate infrastructure and communicate about reliability.
Service Level Indicator (SLI)
A quantitative measure of service behaviour (e.g., request latency, availability, error rate).
Service Level Objective (SLO)
A target value or range for an SLI. This represents what we commit to operationally.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A contractual commitment with financial consequences. We approach SLAs with care, preferring to exceed SLO targets consistently before committing to contractual SLAs.
Reliability Lifecycle
Design for Reliability
Reliability is engineered from the start, not added after deployment.
- • Redundancy patterns in architecture design
- • Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)
- • Capacity planning with headroom buffers
- • Dependency mapping and critical path analysis
Deploy with Confidence
Controlled deployment practices that reduce blast radius and enable rapid rollback.
- • Blue-green and canary deployment patterns
- • Progressive rollout with automated health checks
- • Immutable deployment artifacts
- • Rollback procedures tested in non-production
Monitor and Alert
Comprehensive observability with meaningful alerts that drive action.
- • Service level indicator (SLI) definition and tracking
- • Alert routing based on severity and on-call schedules
- • Alert fatigue reduction through intelligent grouping
- • Synthetic monitoring for critical user journeys
Respond to Incidents
Structured incident response with clear roles, communication, and escalation paths.
- • Incident commander role with clear authority
- • Runbook automation for common failure scenarios
- • Incident communication templates and channels
- • Post-incident review (PIR) process with blameless culture
Learn and Improve
Continuous improvement driven by operational data and incident learnings.
- • Error budget tracking and burndown analysis
- • Action item tracking from incident reviews
- • Regular operational review cadence
- • Chaos engineering experiments in controlled environments
Monitoring & Alerting Philosophy
Effective monitoring requires meaningful signals and actionable alerts. We design monitoring systems that provide operational visibility without overwhelming teams with noise.
Meaningful Signals
Metrics that matter: user-facing latency, error rates, saturation indicators. Golden signals that represent actual user experience, not just infrastructure metrics.
Actionable Alerts
Alerts that drive action, not noise. Clear severity levels, documented runbooks, and escalation paths. Alert fatigue reduction through intelligent grouping and suppression.
Synthetic Monitoring
Proactive monitoring of critical user journeys with synthetic checks. Detection of issues before users are impacted. Baseline performance tracking over time.
On-Call Culture
Sustainable on-call rotations with reasonable alert volume. Follow-the-sun coverage where appropriate. Post-incident reviews to improve runbooks and reduce toil.
Incident Communication
Transparent, timely communication during incidents builds trust. We follow structured communication protocols with clear roles and escalation paths.
Incident Declaration
Clear criteria for incident declaration with severity classification. Incident commander role with authority to coordinate response. Communication channels established at incident start.
Status Updates
Regular status updates with timeline, impact assessment, and actions being taken. Frequency based on severity. Proactive communication, not reactive.
Post-Incident Summary
Detailed incident summary with timeline, root cause, impact analysis, and action items. Shared with affected parties. Blameless post-incident review culture.
Design for Reliability
Discuss your reliability requirements and SLO targets with our operations team.