#Reliability

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Blameless Postmortems: The Template and Facilitation That Works

Our early postmortems quietly assigned blame and taught people to hide mistakes. Here's the template and the facilitation rules that finally made them honest and useful.

Feature Flags for Safe Deploys: Decoupling Release From Deploy

We used to ship code and turn it on in the same breath, so every deploy was a bet. Feature flags split those two events apart and made rollbacks a config toggle.

Kiril Urbonas·3

Four Signals That Matter: Choosing SLIs Users Actually Feel

Most SLI dashboards track things nobody notices. Here's how we picked the handful of signals that map to real user pain, and dropped the vanity metrics.

Error Budgets to Roadmap: Turning Reliability Into Prioritization

Reliability arguments used to be shouting matches between SRE and product. An error budget turned them into arithmetic. Here's how we made the number drive the roadmap.

Multi-Provider LLM Gateways: Routing, Fallback, and Cost Control

When our single LLM provider had a 40-minute outage, every AI feature went dark. A gateway with routing and fallback fixed that, and cut spend 30% as a bonus.

Multi-Region Failover with Route 53: Health Checks and Gotchas

Our failover config looked perfect in the console and did nothing during a real outage. Here's the health-check design that actually flipped regions when it mattered.

Kiril Urbonas·3

Postgres Read Replicas: Routing Reads Without Stale-Data Bugs

Adding a read replica cut primary load 60%, then support tickets rolled in about users not seeing their own edits. Replication lag turned into a correctness bug we had to route around.

Kiril Urbonas·2

••2 weeks ago

Argo Rollouts: Canary Analysis That Auto-Aborts on Bad Metrics

A bad deploy used to mean a pager at 2am and a manual rollback. Now Argo Rollouts watches the error rate and aborts the canary itself before anyone wakes up.

Kiril Urbonas·2

••2 weeks ago

Kubernetes Pod Disruption Budgets — Surviving Node Drains Without an Outage

Node upgrades, autoscaler scale-downs, and spot reclaims all drain nodes. Without PDBs they can take all your replicas at once. The budgets, probes, and graceful-shutdown handling that keep voluntary disruptions invisible to users.

Kiril Urbonas·5

••3 weeks ago

Alert on Symptoms, Not Causes — SLO Burn-Rate Alerting in Practice

Cause-based alerts page you for things that don't matter and miss things that do. How we rebuilt alerting around SLO burn rates — multi-window, multi-burn-rate — and cut pages while catching more real pain.