In practice, we have fixed whole classes of reliability problems by forcing engineers to define deadlines in their service definitions.
From Ruslan Nigmatullin and Alexey Ivanov on Dropbox’s migration to gRPC. Also consider request replication.
Competing approaches to deadlines and excellence
Some people see deadlines as guidelines to aim for, not absolute dates by which a deliverable is expected by. Others see the march of time as an inevitable, unchangeable constraint, and deadlines as inviolable milestones in the pursuit of excellence. » about 1800 words