It’s one of my strongly held beliefs that errors are constructed, not discovered. However we frame an incident’s causes, contributing factors, and context ends up influencing the shape of the corrective items (if any) that get created. I’ll cover these ideas by using our June 3rd incident where a database migration caused a large outage by locking up a shared database and making it run out of connections.

The CoPE is made to affect, meaning change, how things work. The disruption it produces is a feature, not a bug. That disruption pushes things away from a locally optimal, comfortable state that generates diminishing returns. It sets things on a course of exploration to find new terrains which may benefit it more—and for longer.

In my last blog post, I explained why we decided to destroy one third of our infrastructure in production just to see what would happen. This is part two, where I go over the big day. How did our chaos engineering experiment go? Find out below!

Software changes so rapidly that developing on the cutting edge of it cannot fall to a single person. When it comes to asynchronously disseminating information about projects, code comments, PR conversations, Slack, RFCs, and other investigatory documents do a wonderful job, but no amount of async communication replaces the magic of two brains bouncing ideas off of each other.

We recently took a daring step to test and improve the reliability of the Honeycomb service: we abruptly destroyed one third of the infrastructure in our production environment using AWS’s Fault Injection Service. You might be wondering why the heck we did something so drastic. In this post, we’ll go over why we did it and how we made sure that it wouldn’t impact our service.

Transitioning from a monolithic system to a cloud-native microservices environment, Ritchie Bros. sought to modernize their observability infrastructure to support the transition and fuel future growth. Ritchie Bros. has been a pioneering force in the auctioneering market for nearly 70 years, charting remarkable growth through a strategic mix of organic expansion and acquisitions.

Getting the right people working in the CoPE is crucial to success because these change agents must limber up the organization and promote the flexibility necessary to perform resilience. We’ll look for teammates who share enough in common to work well together, but who don’t necessarily perfectly overlap so that they can play off each other’s strengths.