Resilience is not a department

TL;DR

Resilience must be built into your product from the start, not treated as a separate concern or afterthought. Focusing only on performance, cost, or speed can lead to fragile systems that fail in real-world conditions. Make sure your disaster recovery plans are tested under real scenarios, not just documented, to avoid turning your product into a liability.

17 May 2025
Written by Martin Hinshelwood
1 minute read
Capability DevOps
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Resilience is not a department. It’s not a project. It’s not an afterthought.

It is a product capability.

If your product can’t survive failure, network loss, regional outage, DNS breakage, it is not a product. It is a liability with a pretty UI.

Too many teams optimise for performance, cost, or velocity, until something goes wrong. Then they realise they optimised for fragility. Spain’s blackout. Oracle’s healthcare cloud crash. Every one of these was built to succeed in PowerPoint, not in the real world.

If your disaster recovery plan has never been tested under load, with real users and real failover, then you don’t have a plan. You have a spreadsheet fantasy.

The next outage won’t care how good your uptime graph looked last quarter.

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