Reliability starts before scale arrives

Teams often wait until growth pressure appears before investing in operations. In my experience, that timing is late. The best leverage comes from putting testing, observability, and operational ownership in place early.

Foundations that hold up under pressure

Three patterns repeatedly improve outcomes:

• Treat deployments as product workflows with clear quality gates.
• Build test suites that include property-based and load testing.
• Align architecture changes with on-call and debugging realities.

At BlockFi and other environments, this approach helped teams move quickly while reducing avoidable outages.

Keep systems understandable

Complexity is unavoidable, but confusion is optional. Good infrastructure design creates systems that are easy to reason about, easy to debug, and clear to operate across distributed teams.