The reliability of engineering structures and infrastructures is of utmost importance and forms the foundation for ensuring their continuous functionality throughout their expected lifespan. Ensuring the lifespan and the potential life extension of concrete structures in critical
infrastructure is crucial for sustainability and resilience. This contribution focuses on the analysis of identity and conformity methods to ensure the quality of the execution of structures and their impact on the lifespan of these structures. In particular, reliability-oriented safety concepts are
employed, which are based on existing partial safety factor concepts. The study includes a detailed analysis of normative design rules, especially those related to permissible variability measures such as the coefficient of variation (COV) of concrete. The analysis of these scatter values in the
context of design standards shows that there are significant safety reserves that can be used to secure the service life and potentially extend it.