Reliability

Reliability engineering is the practice of keeping systems available and correct, and recovering quickly when they fail. It covers redundancy and failover for high availability, disaster recovery planned around RTO and RPO targets, safe deployment strategies such as blue-green and canary releases, and incident response. Site reliability engineering, as Google defined it, adds error budgets that balance shipping speed against stability.

16 articles

02/07/2023 10 min read

Chaos Engineering: Principles, Experiments, and Production Safety

Chaos Engineering tests failure before users ever do. Learn principles, experiment design, and safety stops that keep production tests from becoming outages.
04/06/2023 10 min read

Autoscaling Backend Systems: Metrics, Policies, and Avoiding Thrash

Autoscaling Backend Systems need stable metrics and cooldown rules. Learn how policies avoid thrash, protect latency, and control…
07/05/2023 10 min read

Multi-Region Deployments: Data Replication, Latency, and Failover Trade-offs

Multi-Region Deployments cut user latency and widen the blast radius. Learn replication, failover trade-offs, and when a second…
09/04/2023 10 min read

Backup Strategies for Backend Systems: RPO, RTO, and Restore Testing

Backup Strategies for Backend Systems protect data you cannot recreate. Learn how to set RPO and RTO, then…
12/03/2023 10 min read

Failover Architecture: Active-Passive, Active-Active, and DNS-Based Failover

Failover Architecture moves traffic when a site dies. Learn active-passive, active-active, and DNS failover, plus the checks that…
12/02/2023 10 min read

Rolling Deployments: Zero-Downtime Releases, Health Checks, and Rollback Planning

Rolling Deployments replace instances in small batches so users stay online. Learn health gates, batch size, and how…
15/01/2023 11 min read

Rollback Strategies for Backend Systems: Blue-Green, Canary, and Database-Safe Reverts

Rollback Strategies for Backend Systems cover code, config, and data. Learn blue-green, canary, and when a database change…
18/12/2022 10 min read

Database Migrations at Scale: Zero-Downtime Schema Changes and Rollback Safety

Database Migrations at Scale need expand and contract steps. Learn how to change schemas with no downtime, keep…
20/11/2022 10 min read

Dead Letter Queues: Designing Failure Handling for Reliable Messaging

Dead Letter Queues hold messages that fail after retries so you can inspect, replay, or drop them. Learn…
25/10/2022 12 min read

Blue-Green vs Canary Deployment: Shipping Without Downtime

Blue green vs canary deployment decided: zero downtime deployment mechanics, the canary release strategy and its observation ramp,…
23/08/2022 12 min read

Retry with Backoff and Jitter: Retrying Without Triggering Retry Storms

Retry with exponential backoff explained: backoff and jitter pacing, the retry storm math, retry budgets, what is safe…
21/06/2022 14 min read

Disaster Recovery: RTO, RPO, and Getting Back Online

Disaster recovery explained: RTO and RPO as the two numbers that size the plan, the disaster recovery strategies…
18/04/2022 11 min read

High Availability: Designing Away Single Points of Failure

High availability explained: the single point of failure hunt, n+1 redundancy sizing, failover design that does not become…
14/02/2022 12 min read

Backpressure: Managing Load You Cannot Process

Backpressure explained: the flow-control signal that travels from a slow consumer back to its producers; bounded queues where…