The following tweet from @saschabates that appeared in my stream this morning caught my attention: #surgecon emergent theme: complex systems cannot be effectively diagnosed without smart generalists who understand them end to end This statement is correct (otherwise it wouldn’t have been a theme emerging out of one of the...

One of the areas of tech ops that doesn’t get its fair share of discussion is troubleshooting. It’s not easy to teach troubleshooting - possibly because how successfully one can troubleshoot a given system largely depends on one’s experience with the system and on quality of the system’s feedback loops...

As you probably heard, on May 21 of this year US East region of Amazon EC2 cloud experienced a severe outage. The event received considerable coverage around the blogosphere - you can find the most comprehensive collection of links on the topic at highscalability.com. The guidelines of design for failure...

WARNING: This post may be misleading. What I call “devops” below is not what the canonical description of the term seems to be. Please make sure to read comments after this post to get a better picture. In the comments to my Rise of Devops post from earlier this year,...

What do you do when you come across a piece of open source software that you’d like to try? You could download its source code tarball, extract the files, build and install it following the rules and conventions for a given programming language (./configure && make && make install, ruby...

Last month AWS released Reduced Redundancy Storage feature of S3. There were several aspects of this announcement that appeal to different people, but I especially appreciated one part - S3 now offers a choice of less availability for a lower price. Availability of your system, just as any other part...

With great interest I read a recent post by Chris Hoff on devops disconnect (make sure to read the comments too). Devops as a way to promote “collaborative and communicative culture” (see John Allspaw’s comment) - "devops the culture" henceforth - was born out of frustration on both sides of...

If you are in IT, you probably noticed that most of the industry’s technical buzz lately has been centered around one of three huge areas - cloud computing, nosql and devops. Unlike Web 2.0 or Social Web, which are about content generation and content consumption models on the Internet, these...

Today I would like to continue my never ending quest of finding parallels between IT and economics and social sciences. I will start with a preamble, but if you are already familiar with a concept of “operations alert” in context of IT, you can skip it. Preamble I have spent...