Most operational resilience conversations begin with the same question: “What’s our uptime?” It’s the wrong question.
High availability doesn’t guarantee low impact. A service can be technically “up” while rendering your critical business processes unusable. A single component failure can spread through tightly coupled systems, taking down entire domains despite individual components functioning perfectly. When modern environments fail, they rarely fail in isolation.
The resilience failures that matter most aren’t about individual component breakdowns. They’re about cascading effects, hidden dependencies, and the distance failure travels before someone contains it.
