Do DevOps Like the Mad King

BURN THEM ALL

Aerys Targaryen II, King of the Andals and the First Men, is not a leading figure in DevOps circles, but he should be. Sure, he was psychopath who enjoyed burning people, but he also grasped a few fundamental truths of automation. No half measures, burn everything and embrace chaos. If you wanna get resilience, you’re gonna need to let your inner pyromaniac out.

So what are we burning?

Everything. Network links? Burn ’em. Servers? Toast ’em. Pictures of your ex-girlfriend while you’re on your third bottle of wine? Cook ’em. Anyway, off topic.

To achieve resilience, we need confidence that our automation actually works. We all remember the days before failover testing. The armies of business continuity consultants, wielding impact analysis documents and invoices. The clown car was full of nefarious leeches. We don’t need ’em. What we need is confidence in our automation.

As soon as we automate, the rusting begins. What starts out shiny becomes dim. Once we’ve automated, how do we know our automation works? It’s a common situation. We haven’t ran it in months. The lady who wrote it all has left. None of us know how it works, we just pray it will when the time comes.