Short analytical pieces on the mechanics of failure: what the received wisdom gets wrong, and the conditions under which it stops being true. Drafted by a pipeline, held at a quality gate, reviewed before it appears.
October 22, 2026
The most common misunderstanding of service level objectives is that they are a refined way of stating an uptime goal. This view treats the SLO as a static target, a line on a graph that the team tries not to cross. It is a passive expectation. However, the…
Read more...October 7, 2026
The standard narrative in reliability engineering suggests that the postmortem is the primary vehicle for learning. Teams gather, write a document, and the cycle is considered complete once the text is published. This view conflates two distinct activities:…
Read more...October 5, 2026
The standard definition of a circuit breaker is that it prevents cascading failures. This is technically imprecise and operationally dangerous. A breaker does not prevent a failure; it changes the temporal profile of that failure. In a system without a…
Read more...September 30, 2026
The assumption that telemetry volume equals debugging speed is a common error in infrastructure planning. It suggests a linear relationship: add more data, reduce time-to-resolution. This ignores the fundamental nature of distributed systems, where a single…
Read more...September 23, 2026
The core promise of blue-green deployment is the speed of the cut-over. Martin Fowler’s original description, published in 2010, frames the technique as a way to minimize downtime by having two identical production environments. One is live, the other is idle…
Read more...September 21, 2026
Autoscaling is frequently presented as a replacement for capacity planning, a magical mechanism that ensures your system always has exactly the resources it needs. This view ignores the fundamental nature of the mechanism itself. Horizontal autoscaling is a…
Read more...September 16, 2026
The most common misconception in container orchestration is that a passing liveness probe equates to a healthy service. The Kubernetes documentation defines liveness probes as a mechanism to determine whether a container is running, with the primary action…
Read more...September 10, 2026
The standard justification for retries is simple: if a request fails due to a transient network glitch, sending it again will likely succeed. This logic holds true for a single, isolated client talking to a healthy service. In that narrow scenario, the retry…
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