Reliability
43 posts — newest first.
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Raft: How a Cluster of Machines Agrees on a Single Truth
Consensus sounds academic until etcd loses quorum and your cluster freezes. Raft explained: leader election, log replication, and why majorities are the trick.
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Load Balancing and Health Checks: The Three States Your Checks Don't Have
Balancing decides where load goes; health checks decide where it stops. Most outages here come from a check that can't tell busy apart from broken.
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Idempotency Keys: The Thing That Makes a Retry Safe
A timeout never tells you whether the work happened. Idempotency keys resolve that — if you get the concurrency and scope right.
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Rate Limiting Algorithms: Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, and Sliding Window, Compared
Five algorithms, one trade-off: burst tolerance vs memory vs precision. Plus why LLM APIs limit tokens instead of requests.
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Retries, Backoff, Jitter, and Circuit Breakers: The Four Controls That Decide Whether You Recover or Melt Down
A retry is a load multiplier. Backoff spreads it, jitter decorrelates it, a breaker stops it — and agent loops break all three.
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The Model Hardware Standard is the first agent spec where rollback isn't an option
Anthropic's MHS gives agents read/write control of lab and factory hardware. What it guards, what it doesn't, and the controls you have to build yourself.
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The runner is the API: why your remediator's contract matters more than your handlers
Everyone reviews the handler that restarts the pod. The safety lives in the runner around it — and handlers that skip it silently void every guarantee.
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The 47th approval click is the bug
Human-in-the-loop is a real control until volume turns it into a reflex. How approval fatigue converts oversight into a rubber stamp — and the fix.
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Why your AI agent should not be allowed to act yet
Reading is reversible. Acting is not. Five things that must exist before an agent gets a write path — and the honest reason advisory-forever is also a failure.
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Your AI agent can't tell a quiet system from a broken collector
Autonomous remediation gates on model confidence and never on whether the telemetry is trustworthy. Telemetry integrity belongs in the gate too.
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Your top AI failure mode is saturation, and the SLI is in a header you throw away
Datadog found ~5% of production AI requests fail, nearly 60% on capacity limits. Provider saturation is an SRE problem you already have the primitives for.
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Cascading Failure: Backpressure, Load Shedding, and Graceful Degradation
A cascading failure is a feedback loop, not a row of dominoes. Removing the trigger does not stop it — which is why the controls have to be in place beforehand.
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Timeouts and Deadline Propagation: The Budget Nobody Sets
A timeout is a local guess; a deadline is a shared fact. The difference decides whether your system sheds doomed work or grinds on abandoned requests.
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Compaction is a reliability event, and you are not measuring it
New research on long-horizon agents finds context compression degrades execution, not knowledge. Treat every compaction as a state transition and instrument it.
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Model end-of-life is a certificate expiry problem, and you already know how to solve it
Models retire on a schedule, the same model retires on different dates per platform, and 60 days' notice is a floor. Treat model EOL as inventory, not as news.
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AI made your team faster. Your change failure rate noticed.
DORA's 2026 ROI research names the verification tax and the J-curve. For platform teams the lesson is blunt: codegen moved the bottleneck, it didn't remove it.
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Agent workflows belong in code, not just visual builders
OpenAI is winding down Agent Builder and platform Evals. Production agent workflows need code, tests, traces, and reviewable contracts.
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Agents are deleting production and nobody is writing the postmortem
Your incident template assumes a deterministic system and a human decision-maker. Agent incidents have neither. Five sections that fix the template.
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The biggest outages still start with a config change — and now agents write them
Fresh postmortems keep confirming it: config changes, not code, cause the largest incidents. Agentic ops multiplies the volume. Here's the defense.
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Google just published the reference architecture for agentic SRE
Google SRE splits autonomous incident response into reasoning, actuation, and evaluation. The split is the lesson — here's what to copy at normal scale.
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The EU AI Act blinked — your logging requirements didn't
The EU AI Act omnibus moved high-risk deadlines to 2027–28. The logging, oversight, and inventory work is still yours — and reliability needs it anyway.
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Every observability vendor now sells an AI SRE agent. Here's how to evaluate one.
Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, AWS — every incumbent now ships an AI SRE agent. A field guide for evaluating one before it touches production.
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Frontier models still fail half your incidents: reading ITBench-AA like an SRE
ITBench-AA put frontier models against 59 real Kubernetes incident diagnoses — all scored below 50%. What the benchmark measures and how to use it.
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Autonomy is a budget, not a toggle: error budgets for AI operators
SRE solved runaway release risk with error budgets. The same mechanism governs AI agents: authority per action class, demoted fast, promoted slow.
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The reliability gap: a framework for trusting autonomous SRE agents
An autonomous airline agent rebooked 1,247 passengers wrong in one weather event. Trusting agents is a reliability problem — here's how to measure it.
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Agentic AI Patterns: Where They Break in Production (Part 2 of 3)
Every agentic AI pattern looks clean in a demo. Where each one breaks in production, the signals you're hitting them, and mitigations that actually work.
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Chaos engineering for MCP: break your tool-call plane before production does
LLM calls fail 1–5% of the time and agent tasks fan out into 10–20 tool calls. How to fault-inject your MCP layer with mcp-chaos before production does.
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The trust gap: bounded autonomy for AI SRE agents
SREs face 50+ alerts a day at 60% false positives while vendors promise autonomous resolution. The autonomy ladder: what an AI agent should never do alone.
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The AI-native SRE stack — a 2026 reference guide
A practitioner's map of the AI-native SRE stack in 2026: six layers from telemetry to bounded remediation, and an honest read on where AI pays off.
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Context engineering: the window is a budget, not a bucket
The context window is your agent's working memory, not a junk drawer. Four operations — write, select, compress, isolate — and a token budget you allocate.
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Agent sprawl is your next production incident
Teams shipping AI agents are recreating 2015's microservices sprawl with worse observability. The governance surface that contains it before it pages you.
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Observability for AI systems — what changes when your service calls an LLM
Golden signals miss the failure that pages you: a confident, well-formed, wrong answer. What AI observability adds — context as a span, quality as a signal.
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Harness engineering: the third phase of AI maturity
Agent = Model + Harness, and in 2026 the harness is the bottleneck. What a production-grade SRE harness contains, with a ~40-line reference implementation.
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Toil and the 50% rule — what it is, how to measure it, and how to kill it
A primer on toil — the manual, repetitive work that eats SRE teams. Google's six-part definition, the 50% cap, and how AI agents change the playbook.
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SLI, SLO, SLA, and error budgets — the reliability contract explained
SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets — the four numbers every SRE team must agree on, the math behind 'nines,' and what changes when agents burn the budget.
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What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
A primer on Site Reliability Engineering — where it came from, how it differs from DevOps and Platform Engineering, and what changes as AI joins on-call.
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Mental models for applying AI to infrastructure
Tutorials answer how; mental models answer whether. Seven I use as the front gate before any LLM goes near a production system.
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Prompt engineering for SRE: patterns that actually work in production
Prompt advice is written for chatbots; SRE workloads are different. Six patterns I've shipped to production for SRE LLM tools, and why each earned its place.
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The MCP gateway pattern: five jobs your agent runtime can't skip
Letting agents call MCP servers directly repeats the no-API-gateway mistake. The five jobs an MCP gateway must do, with reproducible patterns for each.
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Skills for AI agents that do SRE work
Most agent skills are chatbot prompts in disguise. Three operator-grade SRE skills — opinionated, output-contracted, portable across agent runtimes.
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When NOT to Use AI in Production SRE
Most AI-for-SRE writing tells you where AI helps. Here are seven places it actively hurts — and the operational rule of thumb I use to decide.
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Garbage Collection: The Convenience That Shows Up in Your p99
GC frees you from manual memory management — and occasionally freezes your program. Reachability, generational GC, and why GC tuning is a p99 problem.
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Deadlocks, Locks, and Race Conditions: The Bugs That Only Happen Sometimes
Races and deadlocks only fail sometimes — that's what makes them hard. Locks, atomicity, the four Coffman conditions, and why hung agents are the same bug.