From the course: Reliability Engineering in the Cloud by Pearson

Defining resilience, reliability, engineering, and engineering excellence

From the course: Reliability Engineering in the Cloud by Pearson

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Defining resilience, reliability, engineering, and engineering excellence

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Let's start by reviewing some of the foundational concepts of reliability. Every system, application, or component must be designed to ensure a reliable and consistent experience. Your customers expect an amazing experience to complete their task in a seamless and stable manner. To deliver on this promise, we need to understand these foundational concepts and their differences. We will cover resilience, reliability, engineering, my favorite, and engineering excellence. Before we do that, though, let's talk about the tardigrade. A tardigrade is the most resilient animal in the planet. It supports living in outer space, underwater, in the lowest temperatures, and even in fire. In a similar way, cloud-reliable systems are expected to support any condition, and as we know, systems can and will face failures. However, like the Tardigrade, a well-designed cloud system should continue to function smoothly despite any disruptions. Resilience is defined as the capacity for an application to withstand difficulties and and recover quickly when faced with a challenge. To design a resilient architecture, we need to decompose the applications and services into small, loosely coupled, stateless building blocks. Now let's define reliability. The dictionary definition is to be able to produce good results time after time. And this is the key word, time after time. It's not once, it's throughout time. So, reliability in the cloud refers to how customers perceive the service, the capabilities, the dependability, and the overall experience provided by the system that you're offering within your organization. To ensure reliable customer experience, your systems must exhibit traits such as resilient, fault tolerance, and highly available capabilities. Engineering, my favorite, is the art of making magic happens. If you can think of it, you can achieve it. So we will focus on cloud-related topics, including architectural patterns, best practices, as well as first-hand experiences from cloud service providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, and other technology companies. Engineering excellence, it's something that successful companies invest in as part of cloud resilient and reliable architectures. As part of their engineering excellence practices, these companies make investments intentionally, deliberately, and knowingly about how they design, how they build, and how they operate their applications, rather than just by accident.

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