Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy.

For this episode we’re continuing to “Build Things on Purpose” with JJ Tang, co-founder of Rootly, who joins us to talk about incident response, the tool he’s built, and his many lessons learned from incidents. Rootly is aiming to automate some of the more tedious work around incidents, and keeping that consistency. JJ chats about why he and his co-founder built Rootly, and the problems they’re trying to fix and eliminate when it comes to reliability.

Today’s enterprises are struggling to cope with the complexities of their environments, technologies, and applications. On top of these challenges, they face faster release rates, and the need to always deliver the highest level of performance and availability to end-users, at the lowest possible cost.

Whenever an online service goes down, you're likely to hear three words: "it was DNS!" Blaming DNS might be a running joke among network admins and engineers, but it's one rooted in experience. DNS problems are known for causing massive, Internet-wide outages such as the 2021 Akamai outage that temporarily made the websites for Delta Air Lines, American Express, Airbnb, and others unreachable.

Dad jokes lead the way in this episode as we interview Chris Martello, manager of application performance at Cengage. Chris is a wearer of many testing hats, but his passion is chaos and breaking things on purpose. Chaos was a natural fit for Chris with his background as a middle school science teacher, so when he made the jump to tech chaos engineering was a natural fit.

Imagine this: you're in the middle of an important presentation when all of a sudden your video feed starts to stutter. You hear other people speaking, but their words are choppy. A message comes through Slack from one of your co-workers: "I think your connection cut out." You scramble to try different solutions—restarting your videoconferencing application, checking your Internet connection, switching to your phone—but ultimately, your presentation gets cut short.

For any enterprise, they're more than likely all too familiar with the struggles and complexities of scaling their environments and applications. Whether these applications live on premise, in a cloud environment, or somewhere between in a hybrid state, an age-old question engineering ponders on is, “Can my application and environment scale?

Time for a cross over! Today Page it to the Limit host Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty joins Julie for a special episode. In this two part episode, Julie and Mandi interview Kolton Andrus, co-founder of Gremlin and Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty. Each of them share the origins of their respective companies, how they build amazing cultures, and some of the fun anecdotes along the way.

As the world becomes more dependent on cloud-native systems, the tolerance for slow services is decreasing. Users expect instantaneous access to services, whether it's for work, entertainment, or even cloud infrastructure. Even small amounts of latency can significantly decrease user satisfaction: nearly half of all users expect web pages to load in under two seconds, and as many as 28% of users will permanently abandon a slow site.