Imported from terminalskills/skills (skills/gcp-waf-reliability/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add terminalskills/skills --skill gcp-waf-reliability. Copyright stays with the author (Apache-2.0).

GCP Well-Architected Framework — Reliability

Overview

Reliability is measured by user experience, not infrastructure uptime. A system can be 100% green on the infra dashboard while users see broken checkout — that's the gap SLOs close. This skill applies the Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework's Reliability pillar to design, evaluate, and harden production workloads.

Instructions

Core Principles

Defining SLIs and SLOs

# Example SLO definition (managed via gcloud or Terraform)
# SLI: HTTP success rate from the load balancer
# SLO: 99.9% of requests succeed over rolling 28 days
displayName: "Web frontend availability"
serviceLevelIndicator:
  requestBased:
    goodTotalRatio:
      goodServiceFilter: |
        metric.type="loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/request_count"
        resource.labels.url_map_name="web-frontend"
        metric.labels.response_code_class="200"
      totalServiceFilter: |
        metric.type="loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/request_count"
        resource.labels.url_map_name="web-frontend"
goal: 0.999
rollingPeriod: 2419200s  # 28 days

# Apply via gcloud
gcloud monitoring services create --service-id=web-frontend \
  --display-name="Web frontend"

gcloud alpha monitoring slos create \
  --service=web-frontend \
  --slo-from-file=availability-slo.yaml

Multi-Zone and Multi-Region Redundancy

# Regional GKE cluster (control plane + nodes across 3 zones)
gcloud container clusters create-auto prod \
  --region=us-central1  # NOT --zone, which is single-zone

# Regional Cloud SQL (synchronous standby in another zone)
gcloud sql instances create orders \
  --availability-type=REGIONAL \
  --region=us-central1

# Regional persistent disks (replicated synchronously across two zones)
gcloud compute disks create app-data \
  --type=pd-balanced --size=500GB \
  --region=us-central1 --replica-zones=us-central1-a,us-central1-b

# Multi-region Cloud Storage (geo-redundant by default)
gcloud storage buckets create gs://my-prod-data \
  --location=US --default-storage-class=STANDARD

For workloads with multi-region SLOs, deploy to two regions behind a global HTTPS load balancer with --load-balancing-scheme=EXTERNAL_MANAGED and use Cloud DNS health checks for failover. Cloud Spanner is the right database when you need synchronous multi-region writes.

Horizontal Autoscaling

# GKE HPA — scale on CPU + custom metrics
apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata: { name: api }
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: api
  minReplicas: 3              # never below 3 (one per zone)
  maxReplicas: 50
  metrics:
    - type: Resource
      resource: { name: cpu, target: { type: Utilization, averageUtilization: 70 } }
    - type: External
      external:
        metric:
          name: pubsub.googleapis.com|subscription|num_undelivered_messages
          selector: { matchLabels: { resource.label.subscription_id: events-sub } }
        target: { type: AverageValue, averageValue: "100" }

# Cloud Run autoscaling: minimum instances avoids cold-start pain on critical paths
gcloud run services update api \
  --min-instances=2 --max-instances=100 \
  --concurrency=80 --cpu-boost

Health Checks and Graceful Degradation

# Kubernetes liveness + readiness — readiness gates traffic
livenessProbe:
  httpGet: { path: /healthz, port: 8080 }
  periodSeconds: 10
  failureThreshold: 3
readinessProbe:
  httpGet: { path: /ready, port: 8080 }   # checks DB connection, deps
  periodSeconds: 5
  failureThreshold: 2
startupProbe:
  httpGet: { path: /healthz, port: 8080 }
  failureThreshold: 30
  periodSeconds: 5

# Circuit breaker — degrade gracefully when downstream is slow/failing
from circuitbreaker import circuit

@circuit(failure_threshold=5, recovery_timeout=30)
def fetch_recommendations(user_id):
    return recommendations_service.get(user_id, timeout=2)

def render_homepage(user_id):
    try:
        recs = fetch_recommendations(user_id)
    except Exception:
        recs = cached_default_recommendations()  # graceful fallback
    return template.render(recommendations=recs)

Backup, Restore, and DR Testing

# Backup and DR Service for VMs / GKE / databases
gcloud backup-dr backup-plans create web-tier-plan \
  --location=us-central1 \
  --backup-vault=projects/my-project/locations/us-central1/backupVaults/prod \
  --resource-type=compute.googleapis.com/Instance \
  --backup-rule=rule-id=daily,recurrence=DAILY,retention-days=30 \
  --backup-rule=rule-id=monthly,recurrence=MONTHLY,retention-days=365

# Cloud SQL: enable PITR and test restore quarterly
gcloud sql instances clone orders orders-restore-test \
  --point-in-time='2026-04-15T10:00:00Z'
# Validate the clone, then delete it — proves backups are actually restorable

DR testing is not optional. Schedule quarterly:

• Game days: simulate a regional outage; force traffic to the secondary region
• Restore drills: clone a production DB to a non-prod project from backup, validate row counts and known queries
• Failure injection: kill a random pod / zone / dependency in staging; verify SLO holds

Alerting on Symptoms, Not Causes

# Bad: alerts on CPU usage. Good: alerts on user-facing error rate.
displayName: "High error rate — web-frontend"
conditions:
  - displayName: "Error rate > 1% for 5 minutes"
    conditionThreshold:
      filter: |
        metric.type="loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/request_count"
        resource.labels.url_map_name="web-frontend"
        metric.labels.response_code_class!="200"
      comparison: COMPARISON_GT
      thresholdValue: 0.01
      duration: 300s
notificationChannels:
  - projects/my-project/notificationChannels/oncall-pagerduty

Page on:

• SLO burn rate (e.g., 14.4× over 1h, 6× over 6h — Google's multi-window strategy)
• User-facing error rate
• Latency p99 above SLO

Don't page on:

• CPU above 80% (autoscaling handles this)
• Disk above 80% (alert someone, but not on-call)
• Single-instance health (the load balancer handles this)

Validation Checklist

• User-focused SLIs/SLOs explicitly defined and dashboarded
• No single zone — every tier is regional (GKE regional cluster, Cloud SQL HA, regional PDs, multi-region GCS)
• Autoscaling enabled with min ≥ 3 (one per zone) and a concrete max
• Liveness + readiness + startup probes configured for all critical pods
• Health checks trigger automated failover at the load balancer level
• PodDisruptionBudgets for every Deployment serving traffic
• Backups are scheduled AND restored at least quarterly
• Graceful degradation patterns in place (circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff, rate limiting)
• Game days / chaos engineering run regularly
• Blameless postmortem template + tracking system exists and is used

Examples

Example 1 — Production readiness review for a new service

User wants to ship a payments API. Walk through: defined SLOs (99.95% success, p99 < 500ms), regional GKE Autopilot cluster, Cloud SQL with availability-type=REGIONAL, HPA min=3 max=30, PDB minAvailable=2, readiness probe checking DB connectivity, alerting on SLO burn rate (not CPU), Backup-and-DR daily snapshots, and a quarterly restore drill on the calendar. Block ship if any of those are missing.

Example 2 — Diagnose unreliability complaints despite green dashboards

User reports "users say checkout is broken but our infra dashboards are all green." Audit: alerts are on CPU and disk usage (causes), not on HTTP 5xx rate (symptom). Wire up an SLO on payment success rate, set up multi-window burn-rate alerts (14.4× / 6× / 3× / 1×), and discover a 0.4% baseline error from a flaky third-party that was invisible until measured. Recommend retries with jitter + circuit breaker for graceful degradation.

Guidelines

• SLOs measure user experience — pick metrics from the load balancer or app, not from the kernel
• Default to regional everything; single-zone is dev-only
• Min replicas ≥ 3 for any tier behind a regional load balancer
• Alert on symptoms, not causes — a CPU alert wakes the wrong person
• Use multi-window burn-rate alerts (Google SRE workbook approach), not simple thresholds
• Test failure recovery quarterly — backups you've never restored aren't backups
• PodDisruptionBudgets prevent autoscaler / upgrade rollouts from breaking SLOs
• For graceful degradation, ship with circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff + jitter, and read-only fallbacks
• Blameless postmortems focus on the system flaw — humans will keep making mistakes; the system shouldn't let them cause outages
• For multi-region SLOs, use Cloud Spanner / multi-region GCS / global HTTPS LB; resist the urge to shard yourself