Reliability is the hidden metric all businesses are built upon. Quality is a given, but without reliability to keep customers coming back, you’ll have a hard time keeping your business afloat. Talent optimization, fueled by behavioral data, is how you make your people the catalysts for reliability.
Reliable Dictionary: A replicated, transactional, asynchronous, strict first-in, first-out queue. Similar to ConcurrentDictionary, the key and value can be any type.
Reliability
Reliability is a measure of the chance that a required outcome will be delivered. It’s an important metric when assessing risk, performance, and other business processes. It can help companies identify issues and develop strategies to improve data quality and reliability.
However, data reliability is not the same as data validity. Validity refers to the consistency of data formats and is a key factor in evaluating whether data is useful for making decisions. In order for data to be reliable, it must be accurate and consistent over time. It must also be free of errors and inconsistencies. This requires an organization to implement best practices for collecting and managing data.
Investing in data reliability can have many benefits for businesses, including increased productivity and improved customer service. Having reliable data can ensure that employees make sound decisions and that the company is providing its customers with high-quality products and services. Reliable data can also help businesses avoid costly mistakes.
In a world where information is so valuable, it’s important for organizations to be able to trust the data they collect. However, this can be difficult to achieve without proper verification methods. To maintain data reliability, a business must update its logs regularly, and it must ensure that the data is normalized. It should also establish data quality standards and create a plan for corrections.
People are critical to a company’s reliability. From QA teams that guarantee 5-star product quality to the drivers who move goods and services across the country, a business must have the right team to be successful. This is why talent optimization is so important. It’s a process that leverages the unique strengths of each employee and helps them achieve their full potential.
The engineers and analysts at Endeavor, an American holding company for media and talent agencies, used Twilio’s Connections to centralize their data collection, scale their data infrastructure, and share information based on individual roles. This enabled the company to build more effective marketing campaigns and better understand customer behavior. It also helped them avoid data reliability issues and improve their data governance.
Scalability
Scalability is a critical factor in creating and maintaining reliable services. However, it’s often overlooked by organizations that focus more on product features and iterating quickly. In the long run, a service that’s not scalable will become unpopular and expensive to maintain. To avoid this, organizations should consider reliability from the start of product design and make it a priority when laying out specifications. This will help ensure that their service can meet growing customer expectations, while also scaling to meet technical demands.
The first step is to determine the level of unreliability that you can tolerate at each point in your customer journey. This is known as your service level objective, or SLO. You can use an SLO to prioritize which services need the most attention, based on which parts of your application experience the most pain when they aren’t available. Once you’ve set your SLO, you can build an error budget. This budget represents the amount of unreliability you can experience before your customers become dissatisfied with your product.
Once you have an error budget, you can use it to guide your development cycle. For example, you can set a policy to freeze development when your error budget hits a certain threshold. This allows you to focus on repairing issues and improve reliability, while still meeting customer expectations. As you scale, you can repeat this process to track the progress of your team and set new targets.
A reliable system can tolerate multiple faults, and it should never have a single point of failure. To achieve this, you must distribute your services across multiple failure domains, such as VM instances, zones, or regions. These redundant systems can work together to provide higher availability than any individual instance could achieve on its own.
Another way to improve scalability is by designing your service with a resilient architecture. This means identifying components that have hard limits on their scalability and redesigning them to support growth. For example, some applications have limited CPU cores, memory, or network bandwidth on a single VM or zone. In these cases, it’s more important to increase these resources to handle growth than to scale the application vertically.
Flexibility
For reliability to be successful, it requires a multitude of moving parts to work together smoothly. These working pieces include people. Whether it’s quality assurance employees making sure 5-star products don’t dip to 4- or 3-star, or truck fleet managers ensuring items get to their destinations on time, reliable operations require dedicated, high-performing people. But leveraging these people is easier said than done. Talent optimization, a discipline that leverages people data to drive business results, can help companies maximize their people and improve reliability.
Reliable Collections offer a flexible architecture for grouping actions into transactions, with strong consistency guarantees out of the box (via quorums of replicas and primary). They can be persisted for durability against large-scale events like power outages in a data center.
Cost
While extreme reliability has benefits, it also comes with a cost. It limits the number of new features a team can deliver to users, and increases the amount of time it takes to resolve failures. These costs can be incurred in many ways, from the quality assurance staff who ensure 5-star products don’t dip to 4- or 3-star ones, to the drivers who drive Amazon’s truck fleet and deliver items to customers’ doors.
Collection of Reliable Services is a complex problem, but it can be mitigated by using a variety of tools and tactics. For example, you can leverage skip tracing and credit reporting to locate debtors. In addition, you can use collection agencies to handle late payments and negotiate with creditors.
To avoid political conflicts between SREs and Product Management, they jointly define an error budget based on a service’s service level objective (SLO). This metric provides an objective measure of how unreliable the service can be within a quarter, eliminating the need for politics to determine how much risk to allow. The Error Budget is a key pillar of our reliability culture and is shared across all teams.