System reliability is crucial for ensuring service availability and minimizing downtime, which can lead to financial losses and unhappy customers. By making small, incremental improvements, much like compound interest, organizations can significantly enhance their systems' reliability over time. Achieving high availability involves striving for reduced downtime, often expressed in "nines," such as four nines (99.99%) or even five nines (99.999%). The article suggests practical strategies for improving reliability, including maintaining updated runbooks, training teams, reducing human intervention in disaster recovery, and performing early maintenance. Additionally, adopting microservices, moving to the cloud, ensuring redundancy, and utilizing load balancing and autoscaling are recommended. Simulation and modeling through chaos experiments can reveal potential failures before they occur, and focusing on these small gains can lead to substantial performance improvements. Tools like Gremlin's reliability platform assist in identifying hidden risks, allowing teams to proactively address vulnerabilities before they affect users.