Summary

I often say that revenue is made somewhere between a perfect system and a complete ball of duct tape. Any book on entrepreneurship and business growth will tell you there is risk in everything we do. Understanding how much you’re willing to risk and how to mitigate the risk are the backbone of growth. As SREs we can leverage observability to track the possibility of risk and know when a system or application may be slipping to provide revenue. We can further use tools and even duct tape to mitigate that risk in code and architecture. It’s not about perfection; it’s about the best decision to keep revenue flowing and keep enough of your customer base happy to maintain a growing business.

There are multiple ways business needs impact the quality of code and architecture – understanding these can help you perhaps change some of these events, and when you can’t, you can often combat these issues with higher levels of observability and more...