Briefing
Reliability & scale: designing for variance
Reliability isn’t a team—it’s an operating property. Design for variance, not perfection.
Reliability & Scale 7 min
The problem
Most reliability work happens too late: after incidents, after slowdowns, after trust erosion. The real task is to design the system so variance is expected and absorbed.
What to standardize
Standardize the few things that prevent fragile behavior, and leave room everywhere else.
- Service-level objectives (SLOs) that reflect what customers feel.
- Error budgets to govern speed vs. stability decisions.
- Incident learning rituals that produce system changes—not blame.
A practical starting point
Pick one critical service. Define one SLO, one dashboard, and one weekly reliability review. Iterate until decisions become boring.
Implications
When reliability is operationalized, leadership stops guessing. The system tells you when to slow down—and when you can safely accelerate.