Anti-Fragile DevOps for Success

Learn how adapting strategies from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's seminal work, Anti-Fragile, helps organizations thrive across the social and technical aspects of DevOps

We all recognize Fragile software - penalized by disorder, suffering under stress, and robustness only during a change freeze. As a community, we've worked to embrace the opposite in our software by building with change in mind through the adoption of auto-scaling, microservices, chaos engineering, and continuous deployments. This is Anti-Fragile technology - systems that thrive under stress and return untold benefits with disorder and change.

In the end, these are all technical elements to building an Anti-Fragile solution. As DevOps practitioners, we need to contribute the human element to make our entire solution anti-fragile rather than getting lost among individual components.

Transcript

1. Anti-Fragile Principles + DevOps = Success @KeithResar
2. Keith Resar: Bio Wear many hats... Recovering Developer Open Source Contributor and Advocate Cloud Automation Engineer Keith.Resar@RedHat.com @KeithResar
3. Fragile Software DISORDER Stress Failure @KeithResar
4. Anti-Fragile Software THRIVES Stress, Failure and Change @KeithResar
6. dsdsa https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/inside-azure-search-chaos-engineering/
7. dsdsa
11. Meltdown breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system, allowing a program to access the memory, and thus also the secrets, of other programs. Spectre breaks the isolation between different applications. It allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets. Black Swan Events @KeithResar https://meltdownattack.com/
12. Fragile • Difficult to modify • Cannot cope with change • Some value when stable, liability with stress Many organisations have applications (mainframes for example) which are impossible to change, very expensive to maintain, but still running on high cost as they are very critical to the business. @KeithResar
13. Fragile • Withstands stress/change to a point • Does not adapt • Eventually fails and becomes a liability Robust @KeithResar
14. Fragile • Designed with stress in mind • Adaptability features • Best engineered solution Robust Resilient @KeithResar
15. Fragile • Created with change in mind • Improves with stress • Not just technical Creating an Anti-Fragile system is much harder, but once it’s in place it drives the business based on change. Anti-Fragile Robust Resilient @KeithResar
17. Individual just one pretty plane @KeithResar
18. Population the entire system @KeithResar
19. Mistake affects individual @KeithResar
20. @KeithResar
21. Good Mistake IMPROVES Population @KeithResar
22. Bad Mistake No introspection Doesn’t exploit Gives excuses @KeithResar
23. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once @KeithResar
24. Anti-Fragile? RANDOM EVENTS ⬆ or ⬇ UPSIDE @KeithResar
26. Specific steps to introduce anti-fragility
27. Code ...and we’ve already failed Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points @KeithResar
28. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points @KeithResar
29. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points Smaller code drops @KeithResar
30. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points Incorporate feedback loops, including data from prod ops @KeithResar
31. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points Improved visibility @KeithResar
32. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points More frequent deployments More repeatable deployments @KeithResar
33. Platform Encourages Systems Thinking INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER DEVELOPER GIT SERVER ARTIFACT REPOSITORY OPENSHIFT CI/CD PIPELINE (JENKINS) IMAGE BUILD & DEPLOY INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER NON-PROD PROD DEV @KeithResar https://www.openshift.com
34. INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER DEVELOPER GIT SERVER ARTIFACT REPOSITORY OPENSHIFT CI/CD PIPELINE (JENKINS) IMAGE BUILD & DEPLOY INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER PROMOTE TO TEST NON-PROD PROD DEV TEST Platform Encourages Systems Thinking @KeithResar https://www.openshift.com
35. INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER DEVELOPER GIT SERVER ARTIFACT REPOSITORY OPENSHIFT CI/CD PIPELINE (JENKINS) IMAGE BUILD & DEPLOY INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER PROMOTE TO TEST PROMOTE TO UAT NON-PROD PROD DEV TEST UAT Platform Encourages Systems Thinking @KeithResar https://www.openshift.com
36. ServiceNow JIRA Service Desk Zendesk BMC Remedy INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER DEVELOPER GIT SERVER ARTIFACT REPOSITORY OPENSHIFT CI/CD PIPELINE (JENKINS) IMAGE BUILD & DEPLOY INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER GO LIVE? PROMOTE TO TEST PROMOTE TO UAT RELEASE MANAGER NON-PROD PROD ☒ ☑ DEV TEST UAT Platform Encourages Systems Thinking @KeithResar https://www.openshift.com
37. INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER DEVELOPER GIT SERVER ARTIFACT REPOSITORY OPENSHIFT CI/CD PIPELINE (JENKINS) IMAGE BUILD & DEPLOY INTEGRATED IMAGE REGISTRY OPENSHIFT CLUSTER GO LIVE? PROMOTE TO TEST PROMOTE TO UAT PROMOTE TO PROD RELEASE MANAGER NON-PROD PROD DEV TEST UAT ☒ ☑ Platform Encourages Systems Thinking @KeithResar https://www.openshift.com
38. Code Test Deploy Run Scale Identify Fragile Points Deliberately exercising systems with good mistakes @KeithResar
39. @KeithResar https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/inside-azure-search-chaos-engineering/
40. @KeithResar 1. Focus on population , not individuals. Force the systems view 2. Set yourself up for success, identify common fragile points - usually at integration spots and not always technological, then… 3. Stress the system on your terms to improve Anti-Fragile Takeaways
41. Thank you! @KeithResar