The balancing act of reliability and availability

Product reliability and availability are crucial factors for modern organizations, directly impacting user satisfaction and trust. While it's impossible to guarantee 100% uptime due to the complexity of technology infrastructure, companies can strive to maintain high levels of both by balancing costs and service quality. Key metrics for measuring reliability include error rate, response time, and crash-free sessions, while availability is often expressed as "9's" (e.g., 99.9% uptime). To improve reliability and availability, teams can implement best practices such as monitoring, testing, automation, fault tolerance, redundancy, load balancing, failover mechanisms, and capacity planning.