Reliability is about making sure that our application and infrastructutre work as expected, even when faced with unexpected events or high demand, especially when building apps that need to be available and performant 24/7.
For example, when designing a web application, we need to ensure that it can handle a large number of concurrent users without crashing or producing errors. This involves implementing strategies such as redundancy, fault tolerance, or load balancing.
One practical way to improve reliability is by implementing observability and alerting mechanisms. By using tools like OpenTelemetry, we can proactively identify issues before they impact the users.
We can enhance also reliability by incorporating error handling and retry mechanisms in our application code. For example, when making API calls, we can implement exponential backoff strategies to handle temporary network issues, ensuring that our application remains reliable even when transient failures occur.