L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Companion to SOFTWAREARCHITECTUREMASTERYCURRICULUM.md Honest reflections, no sugar coating.
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Course · 6 lessons
~38 hr
Intermediate
Reliability, Observability & Operations
Reliability, Observability & Operations covers: Site Reliability Engineering, Observability Engineering, Learning OpenTelemetry. Master the operational side of architecture: how systems fail, how to detect failures, how to recover from them, and how to build systems that degrade gracefully instead of catastrophically. Perhaps you have run chaos tests, or driven down a ticket queue by automating away its causes. These are operational architecture achievements. This module gives you the framework to systematize what you have been doing intuitively. SLOs may not be new to you — you have likely been tracking them informally. Error budgets formalize the tradeoff between "ship faster" and "ship safer" that you navigate every sprint.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete System Design first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
Site Reliability Engineering: Google's Framework at Your Scale
How reliable should your application be? If your instinct says "as reliable as possible," this book exists to talk you out of it. Every extra nine costs an order of magnitude more…
primary
Charity Majors: Observability vs Monitoring (talk)
locked
L3
Observability Engineering: From What Broke to Why
Here's a production scenario you have lived: the error rate ticks up. Every dashboard is green. CPU fine, memory fine, database fine. The exception tracker shows the same Timeout:…
primary
Charity Majors: Observability vs Monitoring (talk)
locked
L4
Learning OpenTelemetry: One Standard for All Your Signals
Somewhere in your Gemfile history there's a story about vendor lock-in: the New Relic agent you added in year one, the Datadog migration someone scoped and abandoned because re-in…
primary
Charity Majors: Observability vs Monitoring (talk)
locked
L5
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L6
Project: Instrument for Reliability
Take a real Rails app and make it observable: OpenTelemetry traces on the key paths, custom metrics for the operations the business actually cares about, and structured logs. Then…
locked
6 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.