# Reliability, Security, Cost

## Reliability
- define SLOs before scaling conversations drift into guesswork
- instrument critical user journeys and asynchronous pipelines
- backpressure and timeouts beat blind retries

## Security
- least privilege
- secret rotation and boundary-aware trust model
- network segmentation guided by actual threat surface
- auditability for control-plane changes

## Cost
- right-size after measurement
- know fixed vs variable cost drivers
- optimize data transfer, storage tiering, and idle capacity