On Call Is a Product of Architecture
On call is often treated like a staffing problem. Who is rotating. How often pages fire. Which alerts wake people up. Those details matter, but they are not the root cause. On call quality is largely a product of architecture. Architecture Decides Who Gets Woken Up Every architectural decision carries operational weight. Synchronous dependencies increase blast radius. Tight coupling turns small failures into outages. Hidden retries create noisy cascades. Poor isolation spreads pain across services. ...