All Systems Fail

Featured blog by Derek Weeks, vice president and DevOps advocate at Sonatype

Vince Lombardi once said, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”  But in today’s world of high velocity development and release practices, it’s also about how fast you can get up.

Today, we are seeing more news about sites from major online retailers and service providers like HP, Target, PayPal and Neiman Marcus going down.  High site traffic, poor configurations, scalable architectures, and well planned recovery practices all come into play.

But the best organizations have been failing repeatedly for some time now…on purpose.  Organizations like Amazon, Google and Netflix practice regularly for application, system and site outages.  In fact, Netflix has baked continuous failures into its operations through an internally developed Simian Army.  While it might seem unconventional at first, failing all the time allows them to succeed.

Our CTO here at Sonatype, Josh Corman, often reminds us that “All Systems Fail*”.  For those that take this to heart and prepare for the inevitable, they can be better prepared to recover.  In fact, for the best prepared, recovery can be so seamless, it is a continuous part of their operations.

In early 2015, Derek Weeks led the largest and most comprehensive analysis of software supply chain practices to date across 106,000 development organizations (www.sonatype.com/speedbumps). Derek is also a co-author of the upcoming book “The DevOps Toolkit: Building the Software Supply Chain.” As a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, he has advised leading businesses on IT performance improvement practices covering continuous delivery, business process management, systems and network operations, service management, capacity planning and storage management. Derek is passionate about changing the way people think about software supply chains and improving public safety through improved software integrity. He fervently advocates applying proven supply chain management principles into DevOps practices to improve efficiencies, reduce costs and sustain long-lasting competitive advantages. Derek Weeks currently serves as vice president and DevOps advocate at Sonatype. Follow Derek on Twitter @weekstweets, LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/derekeweeks, and read his commentary at http://www.sonatype.org/nexus/author/d-weeks/.