| name | google-cloud-waf-reliability |
| description | Generates reliability-focused guidance for Google Cloud workloads based on the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework. Use to evaluate a workload, identify reliability requirements, and provide actionable recommendations for building resilient, highly available systems. |
| source | google/skills (Apache 2.0) |
Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework skill for the Reliability pillar
Overview
The Reliability pillar of the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework provides
principles and recommendations to help you design, deploy, and manage reliable,
resilient, and highly available workloads in Google Cloud. A reliable system
consistently performs its intended functions under defined conditions, is
resilient to failures, and recovers gracefully from disruptions, thereby
minimizing downtime, enhancing user experience, and ensuring data integrity.
Core principles
The recommendations in the reliability pillar of the Well-Architected Framework
are aligned with the following core principles:
Relevant Google Cloud products
The following are examples of Google Cloud products and features that are
relevant to reliability:
- Compute: Compute Engine Managed Instance Groups (MIGs), Google Kubernetes
Engine (GKE), Cloud Run
- Networking: Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS
- Storage and databases: Cloud Storage (multi-region), Cloud SQL High
Availability, Spanner, Filestore, Firestore
- Operations: Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Google Cloud Managed Service
for Prometheus
- Disaster recovery: Backup and DR Service, Filestore backups
Workload assessment questions
Ask appropriate questions to understand the reliability-related requirements and
constraints of the workload and the user's organization. Choose questions from
the following list:
- How does your organization define and measure the reliability of your systems
in relation to user experience?
- How does your organization approach setting reliability targets for your
services?
- What is your organization's strategy for ensuring high availability through
resource redundancy?
- How does your organization leverage horizontal scalability to maintain
performance and reliability?
- How does your organization utilize observability (metrics, logs, traces) to
gain insights and detect potential failures?
- How does your organization manage alerting based on observability data to
ensure timely responses to significant issues without causing alert fatigue?
- What measures does your organization take to ensure systems can gracefully
degrade during high load or partial failures?
- How frequently and comprehensively does your organization test for recovery
from system failures (e.g., regional failovers, release rollbacks)?
- What is your organization's approach to testing for recovery from data loss?
- How does your organization conduct and utilize postmortems after incidents?
Validation checklist
Use the following checklist to evaluate the architecture's alignment with
reliability recommendations:
- User-focused SLIs and SLOs are explicitly defined and actively monitored.
- The architecture avoids single points of failure through cross-zone or
cross-region redundancy.
- Autoscaling is enabled to handle variable demand without manual intervention.
- Application and infrastructure health checks are configured to trigger
automated failovers.
- Regular backup schedules are in place, and restoration processes are routinely
tested.
- The system architecture incorporates patterns like circuit breakers, retries
with exponential backoff, and rate limiting to support graceful degradation.
- Game days or chaos engineering practices are regularly held to validate
failure recovery.
- A formalized, blameless postmortem process exists to ensure organizational
learning from operational incidents.
