In modern infrastructure, reliability is often treated as a technical target. Oluwafemi Adeyemi, a systems and infrastructure engineer with experience across enterprise infrastructure, DevOps, automation, and artificial intelligence, believes the conversation needs to go further.
“Reliability is not simply about keeping systems online. It is about understanding the level of reliability the business actually needs and what it is willing to spend to achieve it,” he said.
The issue, according to Oluwafemi, is that engineers could easily make maximum availability the default target without considering the costs of achieving it. For instance, to achieve 99.99 per cent availability of the system, additional servers and other features are required. For another system, those same investments may create unnecessary complexity without delivering equivalent business value.
As a strategy for addressing this, Oluwafemi focuses on Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and the relationship between reliability targets and business requirements. “A critical financial platform and an internal application cannot have the same reliability requirements simply because we can technically give them the same architecture.”
Reliability is not simply about keeping systems online. It is about understanding the level of reliability the business actually needs and what it is willing to spend to achieve it
By defining reliability targets based on the consequences of failure, engineering teams can direct resources to the services where resilience matters most.
Error budgets form another key component of Oluwafemi’s strategy. He argues that teams should agree on a level of tolerance for failure rather than classifying every incident as unacceptable and utilise that information to shape engineering decisions. If a service is continuously inside its SLO, teams can continue to improve the offering.
When reliability deteriorates, and the error budget is exhausted, reliability work needs to take priority. “Error budgets give engineering teams a practical way to discuss risk. You can make decisions based on evidence rather than trying to make every system equally resilient,” Oluwafemi said.
His experience managing enterprise infrastructure has reinforced this approach. Oluwafemi’s experience covers all the infrastructure required to keep the production services running, including systems administration, virtualisation, monitoring, automation, high availability and disaster recovery.
He understands that while redundancy and other infrastructure increase resilience, they also incur costs and complexity.
Error budgets give engineering teams a practical way to discuss risk. You can make decisions based on evidence rather than trying to make every system equally resilient
Perhaps most importantly, Oluwafemi sees observability as part of this cost equation. You can monitor every available parameter and keep every log forever, but it can come at a large infrastructure expense without necessarily boosting incident response.
He takes an approach of finding the signals that provide significant visibility into system behaviour and exploiting them to enable faster and better operational decisions. “The goal isn’t to collect everything. It is to understand what information actually helps you protect the service.”
Oluwafemi’s framework is not theoretical. It is informed by hands-on experience with enterprise infrastructure, infrastructure automation, monitoring, resilience and production operations.
His work with technologies including Docker, Ansible and enterprise monitoring environments has given him practical insight into the relationship between infrastructure investment and system reliability.
At its core, he argues that reliability engineering should be treated as a business decision supported by technical evidence. SLOs define the goal, error budgets define the tolerance for failure, observability offers the information to make a decision, and infrastructure investment decides how much resilience you can buy.
Good infrastructure isn’t necessarily infrastructure with the most components. It is infrastructure that provides the level of resilience the organisation actually needs
Reliability, then, for Oluwafemi Adeyemi, is not about building the most advanced infrastructure you can imagine. It is about building the right infrastructure for the service, the risk and the budget.
“Good infrastructure isn’t necessarily infrastructure with the most components. It is infrastructure that provides the level of resilience the organisation actually needs,” he said.
In Oluwafemi’s view, that balance between reliability, risk and cost is becoming increasingly important as organisations depend on digital systems for more of their critical operations.
