Defining "Reliability" under a minute.

I was asked to define Reliability in a minute at a recent conference. This was my reply. 

Thinking beyond software, hardware and networks, "Reliability" is about how we design, build and operate systems -> who does this, what processes we use and how consistently do we do this?  It is about having a wholistic mental model and removing barriers from all aspects & always keeping the end user business outcomes in mind.

Reliability engineering is about anticipating failures, building emergency responses, building guardrails and mechanisms such as quick-heal and self-heal into the ecosystems. Eventually when failures do happen (they will always happen), how can we quickly recover and go back to normalcy, how do we retrospect the failure to derive learnings, and how do we apply the learnings from a people-process-technology perspective back into the ecosystem, and build improvements in a continuous manner.

It is also about having a frugal mindset, and building cost-effectiveness throughout the conceptualization to operational phases. Its not about over-sizing and over engineering to achieve outcomes, rather how intelligently can we achieve goals with minimum costs. 

This is Reliability Engineering in a nutshell. Not a ground breaking answer, but I believe, this simple ground-truth is what organizations struggle to implement in spirit. 

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