A Novel Framework for HealthGoverned Application Reliability in Cloud Platforms

Ensuring the reliability of applications on cloud platforms continues to pose a significant challenge due to the complexities of highly distributed architectures, swift deployment cycles, and ever-changing infrastructure configurations. While Infrastructure as Code (IaC), observability, and CI/CD automation have gained widespread adoption, their separate implementations hinder their overall effectiveness in promoting continuous reliability and operational governance. This paper introduces an innovative integrated framework for Application Reliability and Health Governance (ARHG) that consolidates reliability-by-design through IaC, multi-dimensional observability, and a structured automated health-gate model for making deployment decisions. The proposed framework converts observability data into governance-enforceable health states and incorporates automated health gates within CI/CD pipelines, facilitating objective Go/No-Go decisions for deployments. The framework is empirically validated through a case study in a cloud-native environment, showcasing reduced downtime, quicker recovery, and enhanced reliability consistency across various deployment settings. This study proposals both a conceptual governance framework and a practical implementation model aimed at continuous management of cloud reliability.