How do you incorporate reliability and availability into your testing and deployment strategies?

Understanding your existing systems baseline - Most of the product teams do not know where they stand in terms of availability and of course there are plenty of tools these days to just get the dump of data and draw some conclusions around it but it doesn't seem to show the real character of the systems in place. - Service mapping - Understanding error budgets - Setting up observability Current MTTI & MTTR to be measured to get very accurate understanding of systems. - Instrument observability tools - Define what is reliability - every org seems to have different meaning. People often relate it to SRE but we have a different meaning to Reliability - Build a holistic product and service mapping to get end-to-end perspective.

The best way to incorporate reliability is to have reliability driven SDLC. Try to define the reliability goals at early stage from designing like defining the SLOs & SLIs that we expect to be delivered or perceived by end users. Have the quality gates for golden signals and key reliability KPIs(like SLOS, SLIs, Error Budgets) embedded in the testing cycle. Once the quality gates are passed at each level, then pass the release with canary/BlueGreen deployment strategy. This minimizes the impact of bugs and issues cascaded from designing, coding stages. Develop and have a centre of reliability engineering to constantly track & improvise the KPIs as well as the strategies for building the reliable and digitally immune system.

For repairable systems it may be advisable to consider setting more granular goals such as defining a failure free period and an economical to repair life goal.

Testing for reliability and availability is where the fun begins—if your idea of fun includes breaking things on purpose (and if it doesn’t, you might be in the wrong profession). We employed a mix of unit, integration, and chaos testing to ensure our system was ready for anything. Imagine inviting a bull into a china shop and then patting yourself on the back when the shelves don’t collapse. Chaos engineering allowed us to simulate various failures, like cutting off the Wi-Fi at a tech conference, and see how our system responded. The best part? When the system held up under stress, we could celebrate with something stronger than coffee—maybe even two sugars.

No one likes failures, but in the world of reliability engineering, they’re like unexpected plot twists—sometimes frustrating, but always a chance to learn. After any incident, we held postmortems that were more like therapy sessions for engineers ;) . We dug deep into what went wrong, why it happened, and how we could avoid it in the future. The key here is fostering a blameless culture—because nothing kills morale faster than playing the blame game :) . After one particularly dramatic outage , we revamped our alerting system to reduce response times. Now, when something goes wrong, we’re on it faster than a cat on a laser pointer.

Drawing from my experience in testing and deployment strategies, we prioritize reliability and availability by adopting a comprehensive approach that spans the entire development lifecycle. One key aspect involves the implementation of rigorous testing methodologies that extend beyond functional testing to include various scenarios mimicking real-world conditions. From a reliability perspective, we employ a combination of unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing to ensure that individual components seamlessly work together, and the system as a whole behaves predictably. To enhance availability, it is crucial to consider creating a resilient architecture that incorporates redundant components and failover mechanisms.

Incorporate reliability and availability into testing and deployment strategies by conducting rigorous reliability testing and ensuring redundancy. For instance, in offshore wind power, test turbines under simulated extreme conditions to validate reliability before deployment. Implement redundant systems in battery storage to ensure continuous operation. Grid code compliance studies validate system reliability through rigorous testing before integration. In manufacturing, reliability tests on machinery ensure consistent performance. Such approaches enhance system robustness and minimize downtime, ensuring reliability and availability.

Incorporating reliability and availability into testing and deployment strategies involves defining clear requirements, designing with these qualities in mind, and rigorous testing. I’d start by setting specific reliability and availability goals, then design my system architecture to meet these through redundancy, fault tolerance, and scalability. Testing would include a mix of unit, integration, and chaos testing to ensure the system meets its goals. Learning from failures and feedback is crucial to refine strategies and achieve the desired outcomes.