DevOpsDays NYC 2020: Can Resilience Engineering be sufficiently described in 5 minutes?

Of course the answer to the question in the title is “no” because this twenty-year old multidisciplinary field is as broad and deep as Distributed Systems. Bringing perspectives, methods, and concepts from Resilience Engineering is a long game; my goal is to whet your appetite and lay down enough compelling threads for you to pull on as this important long game unfolds.

Transcript

1. time “Safety-I”
2. time “non-incident” time continual preventing and catching of incidents “Safety-II”
3. There is no “one weird trick” to understand Resilience Engineering and that’s ok! John Allspaw Adaptive Capacity Labs
4. Resilience Engineering is a FIELD Cybernetics Ecology Safety Science Biology Control Systems Human Factors & Ergonomics Cognitive Systems Engineering Complexity Science Cognitive Psychology Sociology Operations Research
5. Resilience Engineering is a COMMUNITY Rail Maritime Surgery Intelligence Agencies Law Enforcement Aviation/ATM Space Mining Construction Explosives Firefighting Anesthesia Pediatrics Power Grid & Distribution Military Agencies Software Engineering
6. Resilience Engineering is a COMMUNITY Rail Maritime Surgery Intelligence Agencies Law Enforcement Aviation/ATM Space Mining Construction Explosives Firefighting Anesthesia Pediatrics Power Grid & Distribution Military Agencies Software Engineering
7. resilience is not these things • redundancy • robustness • high-availability / fault-tolerance • Chaos Engineering • anything about software or hardware!
8. people are the source of adaptation activities to sustain adaptation
9. unforeseen unanticipated unexpected fundamentally surprising resilience plays out in the…
10. situational surprise Buy a ticket and win
11. Buy a ticket and win Don’t buy a ticket and win fundamental surprise situational surprise
12. “…proactive activities aimed at preparing to be unprepared” ability to handle fundamental surprises
13. Resilience is already present and happening in your org! it’s just difficult for us to “see”
14. example “in the wild” it’s needed for handling fundamental surprises we continually invest in the ability to deploy to production when it’s needed
15. • automated tests • availability of (and expertise involved) peer code review • availability (and familiarity with using) feature/config flags • people available and looking for signs of trouble, focusing attention • the ability to contact others who can help if necessary
16. “too academic?!” we can do this! it’s already happening
17. Understanding Resilience Engineering will take time the concepts are not intuitive and also critically important
18. Change Is Afoot 2018 2019 J. Paul Reed 2018 Nora Jones Casey Rosenthal 2020 Jessica DeVita Chad Todd Tim Tischler 2021 Learning From Incidents In Software http://learningfromincidents.io
19. bit.ly/BoneResilience The next talk you see on this topic should be
20. ResiliencePapers.club LearningFromIncidents.io AdaptiveCapacityLabs.com/blog ResilienceRoundup.com Thanks!