Most outages are not caused by the failure you planned for. They are caused by the second failure that hits while you are still recovering from the first.
Most infrastructure is designed to survive one failure at a time. A disk dies, a replica takes over. A node drops, the load balancer reroutes. On paper, every component is redundant.
The trouble is that real incidents rarely arrive alone. A deploy goes wrong, the team scrambles, and while attention is elsewhere a certificate expires or a queue backs up. The system was never tested against two simultaneous problems.
Redundancy only helps if failures are independent. Two database replicas in the same rack share a power supply, a top-of-rack switch, and a cooling zone. When that shared dependency fails, both "redundant" copies go down together.
Map your shared fate. For every critical path, ask: what single event takes out more than one of these supposedly independent components? Then spread across that boundary — racks, availability zones, providers, certificate authorities.
Teams that recover quickly do not have better luck. They have rehearsed. Restore from backup on a schedule, not just when disaster strikes. Run game days where you deliberately kill a component and time the recovery.
A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a safety net.
When we design infrastructure at Sakarnet, "redundant" is not enough. The question is always: what is the second thing that breaks, and does the system still hold?
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