Designing Reliable Cloud Systems

Modern cloud systems live under constant change: new features, new dependencies, and new failure modes. The goal is not to avoid failure, but to design so that failure is contained, observable, and recoverable.

In this post, I walk through how I think about reliability from first principles: clear ownership boundaries, simple deployment pipelines, and boring architectures that are easy to reason about.

From there, we can layer on practices like health checks, structured logging, and capacity planning without turning the system into something only one person understands.