What strategy should you adopt to maintain 99% service availability while adapting to business changes?

The strategy of identifying and automating repetitive tasks to eliminate toil is paramount for maintaining high service availability, particularly when adapting to business changes. By reducing toil, which refers to manual, repetitive, and often mundane work, teams can focus on higher-value activities that directly improve service reliability and performance. This means that engineers can allocate more of their time to ensuring the infrastructure and applications are running optimally, thus enhancing overall service availability.

Automation facilitates quicker responses to incidents, quicker deployments, and allows for consistency in operations processes. This operational efficiency is crucial when business needs change because it empowers teams to adapt more rapidly without compromising the reliability of the services they provide.

In contrast, while options like adding N+1 redundancy may bolster availability, it can lead to higher operational costs and does not directly address the challenges of adapting to changing business needs. Defining an error budget is valuable for balancing risk and availability but does not focus directly on operational efficiency. Assigning engineers to the feature backlog may ensure the addition of new functionalities but could divert attention from maintaining existing service stability, ultimately impacting availability. Eliminating toil through automation thus stands out as a proactive approach to sustaining high levels of service availability in a dynamic environment.