You Can Only Break What You Know About
Chaos engineering has a premise I find genuinely convincing. Tests only check the cases you thought of. Injecting real failure into a real system finds the ones you did not. It also has a problem…
Nothing Alerted, Because Nothing Happened
Every alert you have is built around something going wrong. A pod crashes, a request errors, a metric crosses a line. Something occurs, and the occurrence is what fires the alert. Now think about a…
The Diff Does Not Contain the Consequences
A reviewer opens a pull request and sees what changed. Files, lines, additions in green. What they cannot see is what happens next. Which services call this. Whether a mobile client parses that field…
Kubernetes Accepted It. That Doesn't Mean It Works.
kubectl apply came back clean. Service created. Deployment rolled out. Pods running. And every request returns 503. The thing that took me a while to accept about Kubernetes is that a manifest being…
Your Incident Probably Did Not Have a Root Cause
Read enough postmortems and you notice they all end the same way. One box, one sentence, usually naming a deployment. Root cause: bad deploy. It is tidy, it closes the ticket, and it is almost always…
Is It Us, or Is It Them?
Checkout starts failing. Before anyone can fix anything, somebody has to answer one question, and everything downstream depends on it. Is this our code, or is a provider having a bad day? If it's…
