InfoQ Homepage Reliability Content on InfoQ
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AWS Cannot Restore Data Held Only in Damaged Middle East Availability Zones
AWS has told customers it cannot restore resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone in the UAE, or exclusively in the Bahrain region, after damage during the conflict with Iran. The company says the Bahrain damage spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.
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Zone Redundancy Comes to API Management Standard v2
Microsoft has enabled zone redundancy on the Standard v2 tier of Azure API Management, following its arrival on Premium v2 in December. Standard v2 starts at $700 per month against $2,801 for Premium v2, but carries a 99.95% SLA rather than 99.99%. Zone redundancy can only be configured when creating an instance.
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Instacart Builds Blueberry, an AI-Powered Assistant to Help On-Call Engineers Investigate Incidents
Instacart introduced Blueberry, an AI-assisted incident response system that helps on-call engineers investigate production issues faster. It combines AI agents, operational data, and historical incident knowledge to generate grounded root cause hypotheses in Slack. It uses parallel subagents, MCP integrations, and incident history to reduce investigation time while keeping engineers in control.
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DoorDash Uses Envoy and Valkey for a 1.5M RPS Proxy Cache with 99.99999% Availability
DoorDash has developed Entity Cache, a transparent proxy caching platform built on Envoy and Valkey to reduce redundant service-to-service requests across its microservices architecture. Operating within DoorDash’s service mesh, the platform serves over 1.5M requests per second with 99.99999% availability through caching, event-driven invalidation, failure handling, and performance optimizations.
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How Uber Builds Zone-Failure-Resilient OpenSearch Clusters
Uber explained how it keeps its OpenSearch deployments running during a zone outage. It does this by using OpenSearch's built-in shard allocation and its own isolation-group system, which relies on the Odin container orchestration platform. This way, it maintains both query and ingestion capabilities.
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Airbnb Shares Architecture behind Sitar-Agent Dynamic Configuration Sidecar for Kubernetes Services
Airbnb engineers detailed Sitar-agent, a Kubernetes sidecar for dynamic configuration delivery across tens of thousands of pods, processing updates several times per minute. The system was redesigned with Java, Amazon S3 snapshot bootstrapping, and a migration from Sparkey to SQLite to improve reliability, startup performance, and configuration availability at scale.
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Netflix Scales "Human Infrastructure" to Manage Global Live Operations
Netflix has introduced a "human infrastructure" layer to manage live broadcasts at scale. Using a low-latency "telemetry hot path" and a Live Operations Centre, the company now balances automated scaling with human oversight. This shift, which mirrors strategies at AWS and Disney+, focuses on maintaining reliability through expert intervention during high-concurrency global events.
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From Minutes to Seconds: Uber Boosts MySQL Cluster Uptime with Consensus Architecture
Uber redesigned its MySQL fleet using a consensus-driven architecture based on MySQL Group Replication, reducing cluster failover time from minutes to seconds. By moving leader election and failure detection into the database layer, Uber improved availability, simplified external orchestration, and strengthened consistency across thousands of production clusters.
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Airbnb Expands Global Checkout with “Pay as a Local,” Scaling to 220 Markets in 14 Months
Airbnb expands its global checkout with the “Pay as a Local” initiative, supporting over 20 locally preferred payment methods across 220 markets. The company replatformed its payments system with domain-oriented services, reusable flow archetypes, and a centralized configuration, enhancing integration speed, reliability, testing, and observability for diverse payment methods worldwide.
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QConAI NY 2025 - Designing AI Platforms for Reliability: Tools for Certainty, Agents for Discovery
Aaron Erickson at QCon AI NYC 2025 emphasized treating agentic AI as an engineering challenge, focusing on reliability through the blend of probabilistic and deterministic systems. He argued for clear operational structures to minimize risks and optimize performance, highlighting the importance of specialized agents and deterministic paths to enhance accuracy and control in AI workflows.
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AWS Debuts “DevOps Agent” to Automate Incident Response and Improve System Reliability
AWS recently announced the public preview of AWS DevOps Agent, a new "frontier agent" that aims to help organizations react more quickly to production incidents, identify root causes, and proactively strengthen system reliability.
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From On-Demand to Live : Netflix Streaming to 100 Million Devices in under 1 Minute
Netflix’s global live streaming platform powers millions of viewers with cloud-based ingest, custom live origin, Open Connect delivery, and real-time recommendations. This article explores the architecture, low-latency pipelines, adaptive bitrate streaming, and operational monitoring that ensure reliable, scalable, and synchronized live event experiences worldwide.
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Reddit Migrates Comment Backend from Python to Go Microservice to Halve Latency
Reddit has rebuilt its core backend, migrating Comments, Accounts, Posts, and Subreddits from a legacy Python monolith to Go microservices. The migration improves performance, halves critical write latency, and modernizes the platform for future scalability while preserving correctness across multiple datastores.
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Enhancing Reliability Using Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding: Netflix at QCon SF 2025
At QCon San Francisco, Netflix engineers unveiled their advanced Service-Level-Prioritized Load-Shedding strategy, enhancing reliability during traffic spikes. By prioritizing high-value requests and automating management across microservices, they safeguard user experience and system stability. Key insights stress prioritization, automation, and structured load shedding for optimal resilience.
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QCon AI New York 2025 Schedule Published, Highlights Practical Enterprise AI
The QCon AI New York 2025 schedule is now live for its Dec 16-17 event. Focused on moving AI from PoC to production, the program offers a practical roadmap for senior engineers & tech leaders. It addresses the real-world challenges of building, scaling, and deploying reliable, enterprise-grade AI systems, helping organizations overcome the hurdles of productionizing their AI initiatives.