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.

In the field of Chaos Theory, there’s a concept called the Synchronization of Chaos—disparate systems filled with randomness will influence the disorder in other systems when coupled together. From a theoretical perspective, these influences can be surprising. It’s difficult to understand exactly how a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to a devastating tornado. But we often see the influences of seemingly unconnected systems play out in real life.

Being new in tech an be intimidating! Thankfully, folks like Carissa Morrow are shining examples of how to come into tech from the ground up. Carissa began with a career shift and just started coding, went through the Boise Codeworks bootcamp, and made the jump to tech. Carissa talks about the resilience it took in her early days, and how those experiences reinforced her attitude on continually learning.

When Ticketmaster started their Kubernetes migration, they had to address a huge problem: whenever ticket sales opened for a popular event, as many as 150 million visitors flooded their website, effectively causing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. With new events happening every 20 minutes and $7.6 billion in revenue at stake, outages could mean hundreds of thousands in lost sales.

It's the middle of the night when your phone goes off. You rub your eyes and unlock the screen to see a SEV 1 alert from your incident management tool. The application is down, multiple cloud server instances are offline, and the remaining instances are being overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand. You jump out of bed and start trying to troubleshoot. You log into your cloud provider and try to provision systems manually, only to find out you can't.

You can subscribe to Break Things on Purpose wherever you get your podcasts. In this episode of the Break Things on Purpose podcast, we speak with Sam Rossoff, Principal Software Engineer at Gremlin.

For many years, system uptime was the primary measure of reliability, especially when the most popular method of running software was on bare metal, on-premises servers. If a server was shutdown, rebooted, or otherwise became unavailable, downtime was expected until a system administrator could manually restart it.