#reliability
Articles tagged "reliability".
17 articles
SLA vs SLO vs SLI: the reliability promise, decoded
Three little acronyms quietly run every serious reliability conversation — and almost everyone mixes them up. Here's what SLA, SLO and SLI actually mean, how they fit together, and how to set ones that won't page you at 3am for nothing.
What is 99.9% Uptime? The downtime hiding behind the nines
“99.9% uptime” sounds almost perfect — until you do the maths. Here's exactly how much downtime each level of nines allows, how it's calculated, and how to pick a target you can actually hit.
Website Downtime: the most common causes (and how to prevent each)
Most outages aren't mysterious — they come from the same short list of causes, again and again. Here's that list, what each one looks like, and how to stop it taking your site down.
Incident Metrics Explained: MTTR, MTTD, MTBF and friends
MTTR, MTTD, MTBF, MTTA — the alphabet soup of incident metrics, explained in plain English. What each measures, how to calculate it, and how to actually improve the numbers.
Latency & Percentiles: why p99 matters more than the average
Your average response time looks great — so why are users complaining? Because averages lie. Here's why percentiles like p95 and p99 tell the real story of how your service feels.
Rate Limiting & HTTP 429 Explained
Rate limiting is how services protect themselves from too many requests — and HTTP 429 is how they say 'slow down'. Here's how it works, and how to handle it gracefully on both sides.
Disaster Recovery: RTO vs RPO explained
When the worst happens, two numbers decide how bad it really is: how much data you lose, and how long you're down. Here's what RTO and RPO mean, and how to set targets you can actually meet.
What is SRE? Site Reliability Engineering, explained
SRE is what you get when you treat reliability as an engineering problem instead of a firefighting one. Here's what Site Reliability Engineering actually means, its core ideas, and how it differs from DevOps.
Load Balancing Explained
A load balancer spreads traffic across many servers so no single one gets overwhelmed — and quietly routes around the ones that fail. Here's how it works and why it's the backbone of scalable, reliable sites.
What is a DDoS Attack? (and how to defend against one)
A DDoS attack drowns your service in traffic from thousands of sources until it buckles. Here's how these attacks work, the main types, and the practical layers of defence.
Error Budgets Explained
An error budget turns the endless 'ship fast vs stay stable' fight into a single number both sides can see. Here's what it is, how to calculate it, and how it changes the way teams work.
Chaos Engineering Explained
Chaos engineering means deliberately breaking your own systems — in a controlled way — to find weaknesses before real failures do. Here's the idea, the method, and why it makes you more resilient.
Capacity Planning Basics
Run out of capacity at the wrong moment and your big day becomes an outage. Capacity planning is how you have the headroom before you need it. Here's the simple version.
High Availability Explained
High availability means designing so that one failure isn't an outage. Here's what HA actually means, the building blocks (redundancy, failover, no single point of failure), and how far to take it.
Feature Flags Explained
Feature flags let you turn functionality on and off at runtime — shipping code safely, releasing gradually, and rolling back instantly without a deploy. Here's how they work and why teams love them.
Canary vs Blue-Green Deployments
Two popular strategies for shipping without downtime — and without betting the whole site on a release working. Here's how canary and blue-green deployments differ, and when to use each.
Infrastructure as Code Explained
Infrastructure as Code means defining your servers and cloud resources in version-controlled files instead of clicking through dashboards. Here's what it is and why it transforms reliability.