Ensuring application reliability and minimizing downtime is crucial for maintaining user trust and avoiding significant financial losses, especially in an era where outages are more common than many anticipate. Companies are encouraged to adopt a zero-downtime strategy, which involves creating resilient systems that can withstand various disruptions, including those at the database layer. While complete zero downtime is aspirational, striving for high availability through distributed, loosely-coupled, self-healing systems can significantly mitigate risks. Transitioning to distributed SQL databases helps automate complex tasks like sharding and redundancy, reducing operational complexity and enhancing system resilience. The text highlights the importance of consensus-based replication over traditional synchronous methods, as it allows data to remain available even during node failures, thereby improving uptime. Self-healing capabilities, such as those offered by databases like CockroachDB, further enhance resilience by automatically redistributing data and restoring replication levels when necessary, ensuring continuous availability and performance.