Do you need production write access?

Usually not for the assessment phase. Read access to metrics, logs, and configuration is enough to find the real risks. Implementation access is scoped separately when we move into fixes.

Is this only for Kubernetes?

Kubernetes on AWS is the common case, but reliability work covers the whole path to your customer – data stores, networking, and the AWS services your product depends on.

How is this different from the Infrastructure Reliability Assessment?

The assessment is a fixed 1–2 week diagnosis of your whole platform. Production Reliability is the ongoing work of reducing incidents and hardening the systems the assessment flags.

HomeServicesProduction Reliability

RELIABILITY

Fewer incidents. Predictable production.

Production Reliability

RTZ Labs provides production reliability engineering for teams running Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, and AWS – reducing incident frequency, troubleshooting service mesh and traffic-path performance problems, and building SLOs and observability that reflect real customer impact.

As a product grows, reliability stops being automatic. Incidents increase, alerts get noisy, and nobody owns a deep look at how the system actually fails. We work alongside your engineers to make production predictable: define what reliability means for your service, close the failure modes that cause real outages, and give your team observability they can act on. The goal is boring, dependable infrastructure – so on-call stops being the reason people leave.

Provider: RTZ Labs
Engagement type: Project engagement
Who it is for: Engineering teams running customer-facing production workloads on Kubernetes and AWS, typically 10–100 engineers
Availability: Remote, serving the United States and Canada
Technology scope: Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, AWS, Service Mesh, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry
Related expertise: Istio Envoy & service mesh Observability

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What you get

Clear deliverables and a practical handover – so your team can keep moving after the engagement.

Reliability baseline

Failure modes, incident patterns, and the gaps between stated goals and what the system can deliver today.

SLOs, SLIs, and observability plan

Service-level objectives tied to customer impact, plus the metrics, traces, and alerts to support them.

Prioritized remediation roadmap

Ranked fixes by blast radius and effort – quick wins first, then the structural work that reduces recurring incidents.

Typical outcomes

Fewer production incidents and a lower mean time to recovery
SLOs and SLIs that reflect what your customers actually feel
Observability that surfaces real problems instead of noise
Clear ownership and runbooks for the failure modes that matter

Problems this solves

The situations teams are usually in when they bring us into production reliability work.

Production incidents are increasing faster than the team can absorb them
Istio or Envoy is adding latency and nobody can explain where
Alerting is noisy and mean time to recovery is unpredictable
Service mesh retries and timeouts amplify failures instead of containing them
There are no SLOs, or the SLOs do not reflect what customers experience
Nobody owns a deep look at how the system actually fails

How we work

A predictable flow that reduces risk, keeps stakeholders aligned, and delivers real progress fast.

Discover

Align on critical paths, recent incidents, and what "reliable enough" means for your product.

Assess

Review architecture, metrics, and failure domains across AWS and Kubernetes with production evidence.

Prioritize

Rank findings by impact and effort so your team gets a backlog it can actually schedule.

Improve

Implement or guide the fixes – alongside your engineers – and validate that reliability improved.

Good fit if…

You run customer-facing workloads on AWS, often on Kubernetes
Incidents are increasing faster than your team can absorb them
Alerting is noisy and MTTR is unpredictable
You need a senior, evidence-first look at how production really fails

Not ideal if…

You have not shipped to production yet and want greenfield planning only
You need a 24/7 outsourced NOC as the primary deliverable

FAQs

Quick answers to common questions about this service.

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