Reliability by Design
The decisions made before anything breaks: how reliable to be, what to do when the budget runs out, which work to automate, and whether a launch is ready.
Incident response is the visible part of SRE. Most of the leverage is upstream, in meetings and planning documents. These shifts put you in those rooms, where the pressure is quieter but the consequences last longer.
- SHIFT 1.1PLANNING3 decisions
Product wants 100%
Planning meeting — Product asks for a '100% uptime' target for checkout in the new customer contract
- SHIFT 1.2PLANNING3 decisions
Out of budget, a week before launch
Error budget report — checkout SLO at 99.71% for the window; budget exhausted; big feature launch scheduled next Tuesday
- SHIFT 1.3SEV33 decisions
40% of the week on restarts
On-call report — 23 manual interventions last week; 14 were 'restart the worker when the queue backs up'
- SHIFT 1.4PLANNING3 decisions
Is the Diwali sale ready?
Launch readiness review — Diwali sale in 10 days; marketing expects 8–10× normal traffic for 6 hours