Posts Tagged "Operations"

Load-Bearing Humans

A system that only keeps running because a person is continuously holding it up is not working. The person is working. The system is on life support. 'Working' is one more overloaded word, and most of the time it quietly means 'works as long as the right human is standing there.'

Stop Holding Out for a Hero

Incident response is either an engineering discipline — measured, quantified, repeatable, owned, evaluated — or it is a craft a few heroes practice and nobody else can duplicate. Heroes are great. You shouldn't need them, and you shouldn't bet the company on still having them.

Incident Management

The role-based incident-response model Jesse Robbins brought from the fire service into web operations, written down from memory as I learned it. Incident Commander, Scribe, SMEs, severity, the CAN format, and the discipline that makes the framework actually work when the page goes off at 3 AM.