Reliability as an Engineering Routine

2025-08-18

Reliability is rarely a single initiative. It is the result of repeated engineering habits.

Teams that maintain strong reliability usually share a few consistent practices: clear service objectives, concise runbooks, and a disciplined approach to incident follow-up.

Building repeatable reliability

1. Define service-level objectives in language that product and engineering can both use.
2. Establish lightweight on-call handoff notes so operational context is never siloed.
3. Close incident reviews with concrete owner-assigned tasks and due dates.

These routines create predictable operating behavior without introducing unnecessary process overhead.