Reliable
/rəˈlīəb(ə)l/ to be consistently great in quality or performance
For the last few decades, businesses have faced an unrelenting trade-off when it comes to software reliability: ship new features quickly or guarantee nothing breaks in production.
Teams built walls between "testing" in pre-production and "monitoring" in production, hoping that faster deployments or heavier ops tooling would solve the tension.
We've been told time and again, this is just how it works. Separation of teams was a requirement for building reliable applications.
But that approach reflects an older era—when go live was the finish line and software changed only in big, occasional leaps.
What's changed?
Today, shipping is continuous, and so risk is continuous.
Multiple teams work in parallel, and issues can arise at any point in the process.
The risk isn't confined to a single stage or a single team; it flows through every step from commit to production.
Modern software demands we redefine application reliability
The goal of application reliability is to reduce business risk, before it impacts users or disrupts revenue.
To best accomplish this, we believe:
Reliability is a shared responsibility
Because all businesses have become software businesses, everyone has a shared stake in keeping software stable and users happy; from developers to testers, to ops teams and customer support. Reliability is truly a team game.
Tests & monitors belong in the same flow, written in code, and stored in a repository.
Allows us to take advantage of version-control for audits, programmability for automation, and even new ways of ingestion for LLMs.
Teams should be notified of risk as soon as possible
Because shipping never stops, neither should the visibility into your software's health. By enabling monitoring earlier in the software process, we can catch bugs that may not be detectable by traditional tests.
This is the vision behind Checkly.
A single platform that unifies testing, observability, and incident management, giving everyone on your team immediate feedback on performance and functionality—no matter where you are in the delivery pipeline.
No more "over-the-wall" handoffs. No more waiting for production to find out what went wrong. Instead, you get continuous reliability that identifies business-critical risks before they hit your bottom line.