🚨High Availability ≠ Resilience: The Real Cost of Failover Testing
Your system might look resilient, but is it really?
TL;DR
High availability can mask a lack of resilience, especially when failures occur outside design assumptions. Full failover testing is costly and risky, pushing teams toward performative resilience. The gap between HA and true resilience is often unaddressed.
High availability can mask a lack of resilience, especially when failures occur outside design assumptions. Full failover testing is costly and risky, pushing teams toward performative resilience. The gap between HA and true resilience is often unaddressed, with recovery paths rarely exercised and runbooks outdated. If your system has been running for two years, the rebuild runbook might be outdated. IAM policies drift, and deployment tooling changes, making actual recovery capability assumed rather than demonstrated. Recovery paths decay because they are rarely exercised, and the fix requires explicit recovery ownership, separate from on-call.
Key Points
High availability can mask a lack of resilience, especially when failures occur outside design assumptions.
Full failover testing is costly and risky, pushing teams toward performative resilience.
The gap between HA and true resilience is often unaddressed, with recovery paths rarely exercised and runbooks outdated.
If your system has been running for two years, the rebuild runbook might be outdated. IAM policies drift, and deployment tooling changes.
Recovery paths decay because they are rarely exercised, and the fix requires explicit recovery ownership, separate from on-call.
Why It Matters
If your system has been running for two years, the rebuild runbook might be outdated. IAM policies drift, and deployment tooling changes. Recovery paths decay because they are rarely exercised, and the fix requires explicit recovery ownership, separate from on-call.
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