> The one thing I am sure of is there is no way to just engineer your way to reliability. That is to say, no person, no matter how smart, can just invent some whizbang engineering thing and suddenly you have reliability.

It's seems true for fly's problem space, but in many problem spaces there really are easy engineering solutions to reliability problems.

For a very easy example, I once worked on a rails app that crashed frequently and managed 5 req/s at best. It turns out the app only loaded static data from hardcoded json files on disk and templated that into stuff. In other words, it was a static site. Replacing it with an actual static site + nginx and a cdn instantly fixed all reliability issues for that website forever, and made it easier to maintain the content to boot.