Executive summary Cloud reliability is increasingly critical as recent outages have caused major disruptions across industries. Outages are often caused by latent software defects, not just operator error or cyberattacks. The inherent complexity and layered nature of cloud software make perfect, bug-free systems unattainable. Ensuring high-quality software is essential to providing reliable cloud services, but organizations must also design systems to ensure high availability despite the inevitability of software defects. Future posts in this series will address strategies for managing complexity and building resilient cloud systems. Welcome to our reliability series Over the last few years, the world has witnessed a number of notable cloud and IT service outages. Although the public has come to expect occasional technology disruptions, these outages were different in their breadth and depth of impact.…