Antifragile Systems and Teams

by Dave Zwieback

How Can DevOps Make You Antifragile?

All complex computer systems eventually break, despite all of the heavy-handed, bureaucratic change-management processes we throw at them. But some systems are clearly more fragile than others, depending on how well they cope with stress. In this O’Reilly report, Dave Zwieback explains how the DevOps methodology can help make your system antifragile.

Systems are fragile when organizations are unprepared to handle changing conditions. As generalists adept at several roles, DevOps practitioners adjust more easily to the fast pace of change. Rather than attempt to constrain volatility, DevOps embraces disorder, randomness, and impermanence to make systems even better.

This concise report covers:

Why Etsy, Netflix, and other antifragile companies constantly introduce volatility to test and upgrade their systems How DevOps removes the schism between developers and operations, enlisting developers to deploy as well as build Using continual experimentation and minor failures to make critical adjustments—and discover breakthroughs How an overreliance on measurement and automation can make systems fragile Why sharing increases trust, collaboration, and tribal knowledge Download this free report and learn how the DevOps philosophy of Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing makes use of changing conditions and even embarrassing mistakes to help improve your system—and your organization.

Dave Zwieback has been managing large-scale, mission-critical infrastructure and teams for 17 years.

Genres: Technology, Nonfiction

20 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2014

About the author

Dave Zwieback has been working with complex, mission-critical I.T. services and teams for three decades. His career spans small high-tech startups, non-profits, and behemoth engineering, financial services, and pharmaceutical firms.

Dave is a trusted advisor & mentor at Mindweather LLC, which offers extraordinary support for tech leaders.

Reviews

[Adrian Cockburn · Rating 3 out of 5]

More would have been good

More would have been good. Didn't realise it was just a short paper before downloading. Guess I'll have to go read Antifragile.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short document about impermanence of systems which is the result of their changeable nature. Few quotes that I liked:
- "What you call 'root cause' is simply the place where you stop looking any further."
- "The single root cause of all outages - and all functioning - is impermanence, the changeable nature of all systems."

[Abdurrachman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope this book having more pages to read. Every page I read contains much useful knowledge.

[Pawel Dolega · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of Antifragile (or Taleb's prose in general) and a person working in field related to software/cloud I had to read it.

There is nothing really new here but it gives nice overview of movements happening these days in industry: reactive approach, microservices, devops practices, knowledge sharing.

It contains a handful of interesting insights. As it's a very quick read (20? 30 pages?) you can just swallow it within a single evening. Interesting essay.

[Julio Biason · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really a book, just a paper. But a badly constructed paper.

It doesn't describe what an "antifragile system" is in deep (ok, it's a paper); lists only two examples of antifragile systems; focus too much on devops.

Sadly, nothing useful -- something you can take with you and use when building your own system or leading your team -- in this.