In a captivating conversation, Justin Sheehy, Chief Architect at Akamai, shares insights on making software safer and more resilient. He discusses the futility of root cause analysis and stresses the importance of a shared language for incident discussions. The need for malleable and observable software is highlighted, along with the understanding that all technology decisions are inherently business-oriented. Sheehy also addresses how AI's rise complicates engineers' abilities to handle production incidents, making resilience even more crucial.
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insights INSIGHT
Changes Often Trigger Incidents
Many incidents are triggered by pushes of change rather than single root causes.
Treat changes as proximate causes and design systems to tolerate them.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Adopt A Shared Change-Safety Framework
Create a shared, simple framework of change-safety principles for your teams.
Use common language so SREs, DevOps, and architects can discuss and act quickly.
insights INSIGHT
Observability Needs Malleability
Observability without the ability to change (malleability) still leaves systems brittle.
You must reach the right balance of observability and malleability for your system.
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In this podcast, Michael Stiefel spoke with Justin Sheehy about how to safely put software into production without creating production incidents. Among the topics discussed were the futility of root cause analysis, and the importance of having a shared language for discussing incidents. This discussion included the need for software to be malleable as well as observable, and noted the fact that there are no pure technology decisions, every one of them is a business decision. They also discussed how the growth and use of artificial intelligence poses a major problem for the ability of engineers to understand and fix production incidents.
Read a transcript of this interview: http://bit.ly/4o7iJsW
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