There's a lot of "doing things the Ops way" stuff that's clearly super-helpful, if not essential, if you're seriously shooting for "five nines". On the other h

There's a lot of "doing things the Ops way" stuff that's clearly super-helpful, if not essential, if you're seriously shooting for "five nines". On the other hand, I've seen it go wrong: for example, redundant servers behind a load balancer yielding dramatically worse real-world reliability than a single instance of the backend service managed on its own (while the load balanced setup was also a nightmare to debug...). Are there any good guides that focus less on "best practices" and more on trade-offs (especially from the point of view of someone who's more interested in a simple route to 4-nines than going much beyond that)?