Reliability is a design choice. Teams that define SLOs early make better tradeoffs between speed and resilience—and communicate those tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders.
We standardize on health checks, graceful degradation, circuit breakers, and blast-radius containment. Multi-region is not always day one, but failure domains should be explicit from the start.
Infrastructure as code and automated rollbacks are table stakes. What separates mature teams is how they practice incidents: blameless reviews, action items tied to system changes, and measurable recovery improvements.
