Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Legendary race car driver Carroll Smith once said, "until we have established reliability, there is no sense at all in wasting time trying to make the thing go faster." Even though he was referring to cars, the same goes for technology: no amount of code optimization or new features can replace stable systems. Unfortunately, much like race cars, it's hard to know that a system is unreliable until it blows a tire, the brakes stop working, or the steering wheel comes off the column.

Reliability and chaos might seem like opposite ideas. But, as Netflix learned in 2010, introducing a bit of chaos—and carefully measuring the results of that chaos—can be a great recipe for reliability. Although most software is created in a tightly controlled environment and carefully tested before release, the production environment is harsher and much less controlled.

More and more teams are moving away from monolithic applications and towards microservice-based architectures. As part of this transition, development teams are taking more direct ownership over their applications, including their deployment and operation in production. A major challenge these teams face isn't in getting their code into production (we have containers to thank for that), but in making sure their services are reliable.

In order to make reliability improvements tangible, there needs to be a way to quantify and track the reliability of systems and services in a meaningful way. This "reliability score" should indicate at a glance how likely a service is to withstand real-world causes of failure without having to wait for an incident to happen first. Gremlin's upcoming feature allows you to do just that.

Chaos Engineering, where engineers intentionally inject failure to test the reliability of their systems, is becoming a regular practice for companies who value uptime and availability. As cloud-based systems have grown more complex, Chaos Engineering has become a critical part of the software testing and release process to uncover surprise dependencies, fix problems before they become 3am outages, and bake reliability into every feature.

In this episode, Jason chats with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. Aaron shares what it was like starting out as a developer at RBC and working in early cloud development, and then transitioning to his role as a developer advocate. Jason and Aaron talk about the value applying open source principles within organizations, or “innersource.” Their time ends with a discussion on continuing education and how to keep learning.

In their report titled “IT Resilience — 7 Tips for Improving Reliability, Tolerability and Disaster Recovery”, Gartner presents seven strategies for improving the resilience posture of your critical systems. These recommendations range from how to get started, to identifying IT hazards and risks to reliability, to capturing metrics and translating them into business value. In this blog, we’ll take a high-level look at the report and summarize some of its key findings.