Most production outages don’t start with a failed deployment, a hardware crash, or a traffic spike—they begin much earlier. An untested failover. A retry policy that amplifies load. Hidden dependencies. Alerts teams learn to ignore. Capacity assumptions left unchallenged. Individually, these decisions accelerate delivery. Collectively, they accumulate into Reliability Debt—silent operational risk that compounds until it surfaces as an incident. In today’s distributed systems, outages are rarely caused by a single failure. They emerge from the interaction of architecture decisions, operational practices, and organizational behaviors—creating failures that feel sudden but are years in the making. This session introduces Reliability Debt as a practical framework to identify and manage these hidden risks. Through real-world patterns—dependency debt, observability debt, failover gaps, capacity misalignment, and operational blind spots—we’ll explore how small decisions increase blast radius, delay recovery, and degrade customer experience. We’ll also cover how leading reliability teams proactively reduce risk using:
Sravanthi Naga is a Senior Engineering Manager at Pegasystems, leading initiatives across performance engineering, resiliency, DevSecOps, and platform reliability. A KubeCon speaker, CNCF community volunteer, and experienced engineering leader, she is passionate about Kubernetes, observability, cloud-native technologies, and building high-performing engineering teams.
