Restoring Reliability During Hyper Growth

Context

A SaaS platform experiencing ARR acceleration hit architectural bottlenecks leading to cascading failures during traffic surges.

Approach

• Baseline MTTR / MTTD and incident taxonomy
• Deploy structured observability: logs, metrics, traces with SLO dashboards
• Capacity & load modeling against projected growth scenarios
• Risk-based prioritization of refactors vs tactical patches

Implementation

• Introduced structured on-call playbooks + rotation enablement
• Refactored hot path services to async / queue-driven patterns
• Instituted progressive rollouts & health gates
• Automated infra scaling policies and budget guardrails

Results

• Stability restored inside 3 weeks with declining incident slope
• Executive confidence regained; paused churn narrative
• Reduced firefighting freeing 30% engineer capacity for roadmap
• Foundation for SOC2 / governance acceleration

Lessons

• Instrument early to argue with data not opinions
• Codify incident taxonomy before scaling teams
• Refactor by economic impact not technical purity