Availability & Resilience

Every testing, monitoring, and reliability practice you own rests on one assumption: same input, same output. An LLM in the call path removes it. What replaces it is evaluation, thresholds, and verification as an explicit architectural layer with a cost and an owner.

Reliability isn't only a technical property, it's an ownership property. Two decisions sit underneath every reliable system, what actually matters and who is accountable for keeping it up, and most organizations have made neither.

Reliability engineering asks what happens when a component becomes unavailable. Most organizations never ask that about the person who holds all the architectural context — and the six-week test to find out if you have that single point of failure.

"Sign In with Google" is convenient, but it turns your Google account into a single point of failure — locked out of Google means locked out of everything linked to it. Why password managers and passkeys give the same one-click convenience without the coupling.

Customers don't care whether an outage was planned. Why routine maintenance windows quietly cap your real availability far below the 99.9%+ your team thinks it's hitting, and why the fix is zero-downtime deployment, not a bigger excuse.