// Topics / Reliability

Reliability

40 entries tagged “Reliability”

    The Review Queue Is Your Real Agent Limit · 4 min Plan agent rollouts like capacity: risk-weighted review demand against effective reviewer-hours. Past the constraint, seats buy inventory, not throughput. ai operations teams A Backup Model You Never Exercise Is Not a Backup · 4 min Vendor count is inventory; measured failover time is resilience. Shadow replay, a bounded canary, and a recovery clock with defined start and stop. ai reliability strategy Autonomy Without a Demotion Path Is Permission Creep · 4 min Teams can describe how agents earn autonomy. Few can take it back. Write the transition contract: trigger, authority, mechanics, re-entry. ai governance reliability The Eval Inversion · 5 min Two frontier labs lost containment this summer, in eval environments. The more adversarial the workload, the weaker the walls around it. Invert that. ai security reliability Garbage Context, Confident Answer · 4 min Most AI failures are context failures wearing a model's face. Score retrieval with groundedness and margin, check freshness against live state. ai reliability architecture AI Insurance Will Ask for Evidence, Not Intent · 4 min As insurers exclude AI, protection tracks evidence, not intent. Your operating cadence is your audit trail. governance ai executive Reliability Is the Autonomy Ceiling · 4 min How much autonomy to give an AI agent: bound its failure rate with the rule of three, shadow mode, and fault injection, then price it by failure cost. ai reliability operations Agent Identity Is the New Control Plane · 4 min AI agents need workload identity, not shared API keys: SPIFFE SVIDs, RFC 8693 token exchange, and Vault leases make access scoped, attributable, revocable. ai reliability security The Benchmark You Didn't Build · 4 min Use public LLM benchmarks as a shortlist filter, then decide on an owned eval: programmatic assertions, a versioned LLM judge, and paired per-case diffs. ai reliability metrics Agentic Systems at Scale: The New Reliability Contract · 4 min An AI agent reliability contract is real only where the control plane enforces it: scoped credentials, a deny-by-default tool gateway, a sandbox. ai reliability operations The Anti-Fragile AI Organization · 4 min A warm LLM fallback is a standing cost that needs an owner. Price portability per feature, and turn each vendor shock into a capability you keep. teams ai reliability Designing the AI Leadership Bench: Roles, Interfaces, and Failure Boundaries Canon post — · 2 min Scaling AI needs a leadership bench: named owners for product, platform, applied AI, and governance, with failure handoffs rehearsed before incidents. leadership teams ai How to Run an AI Incident Review That Changes Architecture, Not Slides · 2 min An AI incident review is done when it changes architecture, evals, alerting, or ownership. An eight-part template that ends in fixes, owners, and dates. reliability ai governance AI Evaluation and Production Governance: A Maturity Model · 4 min A five-level maturity model for AI evaluation and production governance, from vibes-based deploys to CI eval gates, production sampling, and rollback. governance ai reliability Why Most Enterprise AI Architecture Fails in Year One · 3 min Enterprise AI architecture fails in year one when teams expect deterministic behavior from a statistical engine. Build failure boundaries and telemetry. architecture ai reliability Red-Teaming Distributed Databases Before the Black Swan · 7 min Most catastrophic distributed database incidents are compound failures nobody practiced. How to red-team partitions, clock skew, and operator error. distributed-systems databases reliability Building Reliable AI Agents in Go · 5 min How I build reliable AI agents in Go: bounded tools, schema validation at the boundary, idempotent state, and a supervisor loop with hard limits. agents reliability ai AI Incident Response: Failures That Don't Look Like Outages · 4 min AI systems can return 200 OK while confidently wrong. How to detect, contain, and learn from AI incidents using proven incident response principles. incident-management ai reliability Agentic Workflows in Production: Constrain the Blast Radius · 5 min AI agents that take actions carry real blast radius. Policy allowlists, structured workflows, idempotent steps, tracing, and a shadow-mode rollout. agents ai production Multi-Model LLM Routing and Fallbacks in Production · 4 min Betting on one LLM provider is a database with no failover. How I route between models, chain fallbacks, and log which model served each request. ai architecture llm Resilient Engineering Teams Are Boring Teams · 4 min The engineering teams that got through 2022 best had the least drama: no heroics, no single points of failure, sane on-call, and bad news raised early. teams leadership reliability Tech Layoffs 2022: What I Saw From the Inside · 5 min What I saw during the 2022 tech layoff wave, and what helps engineering teams survive contraction without burning out. leadership teams hiring The December 2021 AWS us-east-1 Outage Was Predictable · 5 min The December 7 us-east-1 outage hit AWS control planes, not running workloads. Why it keeps catching teams out, and the multi-region basics that help. cloud incident-management reliability What a 3 AM Outage Taught Me About Incident Management · 6 min A 47-minute outage fixed by a 90-second rollback. How I run incidents now: symptom alerts, clear roles, mitigate first, short runbooks, real postmortems. incident-management reliability SRE Team Structures: Stop Renaming Your Ops Team · 5 min Centralized, embedded, or platform SRE: how each model fails, the engagement tiers and entry criteria I use, and why renaming ops to SRE changes nothing. reliability teams leadership Postgres Reliability: Restores, Failover, Safe Migrations · 8 min Practical database reliability from running Postgres in production: configs, safe migration patterns, and the operational habits that prevent outages. databases reliability infrastructure Observability-Driven Development: Instrument Before You Ship · 4 min Observability-driven development without the jargon: structured logs, RED metrics, traces, and SLO alerts that ship with each feature. observability development reliability Chaos Engineering Without Hypotheses Is Theater · 3 min Teams love saying they do chaos engineering. Few actually have hypotheses. Even fewer fix what they find. reliability opinion Business Continuity for Engineering Teams: Beyond the Binder · 5 min Most BCP documents are shelf-ware. What keeps engineering teams running in a crisis: no human single points of failure, real runbooks, and drills. reliability engineering remote-work Zero-Downtime Deployments: Migrations, Probes, and Habits · 5 min Zero-downtime deploys depend less on tooling than on expand-and-contract migrations, backward-compatible code, readiness probes, and graceful shutdown. ci-cd devops kubernetes Load Testing Strategies That Find Real Breaking Points · 3 min Most load tests produce comforting numbers instead of answers. Soak, spike, and baseline tests with production-shaped data, think time, and percentiles. testing performance reliability SLOs and Error Budgets That Change How Teams Ship · 5 min Most SLOs are dashboards nobody acts on. Pick indicators that reflect real users, set targets from data, and make error budgets change how your team ships. reliability observability engineering Designing for Failure: Timeouts, Circuit Breakers, Failover · 3 min Timeouts, blast-radius isolation, fallbacks, circuit breakers, and tested failover: the rules I follow so one slow dependency can't take down everything. reliability architecture distributed-systems Async Job Processing Patterns: Queues, Retries, Idempotency · 6 min Background job patterns from a fintech data pipeline: priority queues, idempotent workers, backoff with jitter, dead letter queues, and the outbox. backend architecture reliability Partial Failure in Distributed Systems: Lessons From Fintech · 6 min Designing distributed systems for partial failure at a fintech startup: timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and idempotency. distributed-systems reliability architecture SRE Principles for Small Teams: Skip the Cargo Cult · 4 min Teams copy Google's SRE playbook without asking if it fits. What matters for small teams: one SLO, error budgets, toil, alerts, and postmortems. reliability devops operations Incident Management for Growing Teams: What to Change · 5 min How incident response changed as our fintech startup outgrew five people: incident roles, severity levels, sane on-call, mitigation first, real follow-up. incident-management devops reliability Chaos Engineering for Small Teams: No Netflix Required · 4 min Chaos engineering for a small team: start with whiteboard game days, then staging experiments with kill and tc. Always a hypothesis, always a stop button. reliability testing devops Data Pipelines That Survive Production: How I Build Them · 6 min Every data pipeline I built at a fintech startup broke. Raw storage, idempotent writes, boundary validation, and output-shape alerts made them recoverable. data reliability architecture Building Resilient Systems: Lessons from Production Failures · 7 min Production incidents show where architecture bends and breaks. Lessons on designing for failure, limiting blast radius, and making recovery routine. reliability architecture engineering
All topics →