The Four Ages of Reliability Engineering
In 2003, a Google engineer named Ben Treynor Sloss was handed a team of seven software engineers and told to keep Google’s production systems running. His approach — treating operations as a software engineering problem — would eventually reshape an entire industry. But in the two decades that followed, the world changed beneath our feet: monoliths shattered into microservices, on-prem servers migrated to ephemeral cloud infrastructure, and the sheer complexity of modern distributed systems outpaced any human team’s ability to reason about them in real time. Now, we are entering a new era where AI agents don’t just assist operations; they drive them. ...
