Why promoting failure can increase Resiliency

"Everything fails, all the time" is a mantra attributed to Werner Vogels , CTO of Amazon.com.

 Considering the ideas supporting this mantra leads to some interesting practical issues

 1)     An infrastructure will fail

 As infrastructures grows , scale becomes non-trivial. Added to environments supporting multiple technologies , with constant change leads to increased instances of failure or errors. Accept failure will occur and manage systems based on this assumption.

Compare with the old style thinking which underpinned – “build-once” systems, where engineers through a system over the wall – and only reviewed in an outage

2)     Testing for these failures in the Production environment , with engineers available to fix the problems

  This point will raise debate. My colleagues argue that purposefully disabling infrastructure services should never occur in a Production environment. It should always be applied in Non-Production environment. How many organisations have an exact setup in Non-production as Production , with the same resiliency , server configurations, database loads etc?

3)     If the failure occurs again , the infrastructure must recovery automatically without no disruption to the user experience

Once identifying repeated failures , apply fixes or steps which allow the services to recover automatically with no or minimal impact on the users. It’s a challenge – but worth it . It’s all about continuously testing and improving. Ultimately gaining back time to focus on core skills

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