From 95% to 99%+ availability
95% availability sounds respectable — until you realize it means your service is down more than 8 hours a week. Getting to 99% and beyond isn't about heroics or more on-call. It's an engineering discipline with well-known moves.
The problem
Availability plateaus when reliability is treated as an ops problem instead of a system property. Common patterns: no one agrees what "up" means, monitoring alerts on servers instead of user experience, single points of failure hide in plain sight, and incidents are resolved but never learned from — so the same failures repeat.
What we do
SLOs & error budgets
Define what "up" means from the user's perspective, set measurable objectives per service, and use error budgets to balance feature speed against stability.
Observability
Metrics, logs, and traces unified in Azure Monitor / Application Insights or Grafana — alerting on symptoms users feel, not on CPU graphs nobody trusts.
Resilience engineering
Eliminate single points of failure: zone redundancy, health probes, retries with backoff, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, and load-tested capacity.
Incident management
On-call that doesn't burn people out, runbooks that shorten every incident, and blameless post-incident reviews that permanently remove failure classes.
How an engagement runs
- Baseline: measure real availability from the user's perspective — it's usually different from what the dashboard claims.
- Find the pareto: incident history analysis. A handful of failure classes almost always cause most of the downtime; we fix those first.
- Engineer the fixes: architecture changes, automation, and observability delivered incrementally — each one visibly moving the availability number.
- Institutionalize: SLO reviews, error budget policy, and incident practices become part of how your team runs — not a binder on a shelf.
What you get
- Availability measured honestly and improved from ~95% to 99%+, with the trajectory visible month over month.
- Fewer, shorter incidents — and each one making the system stronger.
- An SLA you can put in customer contracts with confidence instead of crossed fingers.