[sjellis]

Speaking as an ops person, my first thought is that you have technical or architecture debt. Obviously, big and/or very rapidly growing systems will hit limits and need constant attention, but these days designing most applications to scale is not a problem.

The root cause of many operations issues that I see these days stems from one or more deficiencies in the development process. I don't say "deficiencies in developers": to get safe development at speed, you need a disciplined development process with appropriate feedback mechanisms: unit tests, integration tests, performance tests, static analysis, code review etc. The default state of code is "buggy", because humans are not perfect.