The Reliability Pillar
Build systems that recover gracefully from failure and serve users consistently at scale — with SLOs, error budgets, and resilient architecture.
Reliability is availability under failure
Cloud workloads fail. The Reliability pillar designs for failure, measures it, and makes recovery a repeatable practice.
Redundancy, isolation, graceful degradation, and circuit breakers keep partial failures from becoming outages.
Balance velocity and stability with SLOs and error budgets that tell teams when to ship and when to fix.
Automated failover, runbooks, incident response, and blameless postmortems reduce mean time to recovery.
What the Reliability pillar covers
From HA/DR design to observability and incident management.
User-facing reliability targets, measured and defended with error budgets and burn-rate alerts.
Multi-AZ, multi-region, backups, and disaster-recovery plans tested regularly, not just documented.
Metrics, logs, traces, and health checks that reveal failure modes before users notice them.
Documented response procedures and game-day exercises that validate recovery in realistic conditions.
Three levels of reliability maturity
Move from hoping it stays up to engineering systems that fail safely.
Backups, basic monitoring, and documented recovery steps exist for production workloads.
SLOs, runbooks, automated alerting, and tested failover are part of every service launch.
Chaos engineering, predictive detection, and continuous reliability improvements driven by data.
Build reliable systems
Read the full Reliability pillar documentation or run your first automated review with WAFPass.