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”
   

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2. time
   “non-incident” time
   continual preventing and catching of incidents
   “Safety-II”
   

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3. There is no “one weird trick” to
   understand
   Resilience Engineering
   and that’s ok!
   John Allspaw
   Adaptive Capacity Labs
   

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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
   

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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
   

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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
   

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7. resilience is not these things
   • redundancy
   • robustness
   • high-availability / fault-tolerance
   • Chaos Engineering
   • anything about software or hardware!
   

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8. people are the source of
   adaptation
   activities to sustain adaptation
   

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9. unforeseen
   unanticipated
   unexpected
   fundamentally surprising
   resilience plays out in the…
   

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10. situational
    surprise
    Buy a
    ticket
    and win
    

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11. Buy a
    ticket
    and win
    Don’t
    buy a
    ticket
    and win
    fundamental
    surprise
    situational
    surprise
    

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12. “…proactive activities aimed at
    preparing to be unprepared”
    ability to handle fundamental
    surprises
    

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13. Resilience is already present
    and happening in your org!
    it’s just difficult for us to “see”
    

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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
    

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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
    

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16. “too academic?!”
    we can do this!
    it’s already happening
    

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17. Understanding
    Resilience Engineering will take time
    the concepts are not intuitive
    and also
    critically important
    

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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
    

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19. bit.ly/BoneResilience
    The next talk you see on this topic should be
    

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20. ResiliencePapers.club
    LearningFromIncidents.io
    AdaptiveCapacityLabs.com/blog
    ResilienceRoundup.com
    Thanks!
    

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