Brian DeVore Consulting
Reliability & Resilience

Your customers notice every minute of downtime. Do you have a plan?

Reliability isn't about buying more redundancy — it's about designing systems that fail gracefully and recover fast. We help you build the SLOs, playbooks, and architecture that give your team confidence and your customers trust.

The reliability gaps most teams don't see coming

Most reliability problems aren't caused by bad engineers — they're caused by missing systems. If you can't answer these quickly, there are gaps to address.

What's your RTO and RPO — and have you actually tested them?

Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective are often defined on paper and never validated. When a real outage hits, teams discover the gap the hard way.

No runbooks means every incident starts from scratch

Without documented response procedures, your engineers spend the first 20 minutes of every incident figuring out what to do instead of fixing it.

No SLOs means you can't measure reliability — or improve it

If you don't have defined error budgets, you're making reliability trade-offs by gut feel. That leads to either over-engineering or underinvesting.

What's included

Concrete deliverables — not vague "advisory" work.

SLO definition and error budget framework

We help you define meaningful SLOs for your critical user journeys, set error budgets, and build dashboards to track them.

Disaster recovery plan with documented RTO/RPO

A written, tested DR plan that specifies recovery targets, ownership, and procedures — not a hope-for-the-best strategy.

Runbook library for top-10 incident scenarios

Documented step-by-step response procedures for your most common failure modes — so anyone on the team can execute them.

On-call structure and escalation paths

PagerDuty or Opsgenie setup, rotation design, and escalation policies that don't burn out your engineers.

Architecture resilience review

A structured review of single points of failure, dependency chains, and blast radius in your current architecture.

Chaos engineering starter program

Controlled failure injection to validate your recovery procedures before a real incident validates them for you.

Post-mortem process and blameless culture framework

A structured post-mortem template and facilitation approach that turns incidents into learning without blame.

Monthly reliability review

We track SLO burn rates, review recent incidents, and update runbooks as your system evolves.

How it works

A structured approach, not trial-and-error.

1

Reliability baseline

We map your current architecture, identify single points of failure, review past incident data, and assess your current SLO/SLA posture.

2

Design for failure

We define your SLOs, draft the DR plan with realistic RTOs and RPOs, and identify the highest-value resilience improvements.

3

Build the playbooks

We create runbooks for your top failure scenarios, set up on-call rotations, and configure alerting with proper severity levels.

4

Test and iterate

We validate recovery procedures through controlled exercises, run the first post-mortems, and continuously improve based on real incidents.

What you can expect

Specific, measurable results — not "improved efficiency."

99.9%

Uptime target with a plan to achieve it

Not just a goal — a concrete architecture and operations plan that supports the SLA your customers expect.

60%

Reduction in mean time to resolve (MTTR)

Runbooks and documented procedures mean your team spends less time figuring out what to do and more time fixing it.

1 day

Time to find and follow an incident runbook

From zero runbooks to a complete library for your top incident types — typically delivered in the first sprint.

Who this is for

This service works best for companies in a specific situation. Here's how to know if it's right for you.

SaaS companies with paying customersDowntime directly impacts revenue, churn, and trust. The cost of reliability engineering is a fraction of the cost of a major outage.
Healthtech and fintech companies under compliance scrutinyHIPAA, SOC2, and PCI all have availability and business continuity requirements. Reliability engineering is compliance work.
Engineering teams post-launch scaling to $1M+ ARREarly-stage systems often weren't designed for reliability. The time to address this is before you have 10,000 customers depending on it.
Companies that have had a serious incident in the past yearIf you've experienced a painful outage, you already know the cost. This is how you prevent the next one.

Pricing

Reliability & Resilience is included in the Starter retainer ($1,500/mo) and all higher tiers. The depth of engagement scales with tier — from foundational SLOs and runbooks at Starter to full chaos engineering and continuous resilience testing at Growth.

Common questions

Ready to get started?

Schedule a free 30-minute discovery call. No pitch deck. Just an honest conversation about your cloud environment.