Senior SRE • Shift-Left Reliability • Open Source
Creator & Maintainer of NthLayer
NthLayer — Shift-left reliability for platform teams.
NthLayer is an open-source Operations-as-Code engine that generates the entire observability and reliability stack from a single YAML file.
Most reliability decisions happen too late — after deployment, during incidents, in postmortems. NthLayer moves them earlier:
| Problem | NthLayer Solution |
|---|---|
| SLOs set in isolation | Validate against dependency chains |
| Alert when budget exhausted | Predict exhaustion with drift detection |
| Missing metrics found in incidents | Enforce before deployment |
| "Is this ready?" = opinion | "Is this ready?" = deterministic CI check |
pip install nthlayer
nthlayer check-deploy --service payment-api→ github.com/rsionnach/nthlayer
Reliability has a timing problem. We've invested heavily in incident response — better alerting, faster recovery, thorough postmortems. But when in a service's lifecycle do we define reliability?
GitHub gave us version control for code. Terraform gave us version control for infrastructure. Security has shift-left. Reliability should too.
I wrote about this: Shift-Left Reliability
- Drift detection — Predict SLO exhaustion before it happens
- Dependency intelligence — Calculate what SLO targets are actually achievable
- CI/CD gates — Block deploys when error budget is exhausted
- Metric enforcement — Validate OpenTelemetry conventions before production
- NthLayer: github.com/rsionnach/nthlayer
- Article: Shift-Left Reliability
- LinkedIn: rob-fox-29a29024