SRE Weekly Issue #48

A detailed description of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), including a discussion of the cost versus creating a DR site oneself. This is the part I always wonder about:

However, for larger enterprises with complex infrastructures and larger data volumes spread across disparate systems, DRaaS has often been too complicated and expensive to implement.

This one’s so short I can almost quote the whole thing here. I love its succinctness:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Just over four years ago, Amazon had a major outage in Elastic Block Store (EBS). Did you see impact? I sure did. Here’s Netflix’s account of how they survived the outage mostly unscathed.

I’m glad to see more people writing that Serverless != #NoOps. This article is well-argued even though it turns into an OnPage ad 3 paragraphs from the end.

What else can we expect from Greater Than Code + Charity Majors? This podcast is 50 minutes of awesome, and there’s a transcription, too! Listen/read for awesome phrases like “stamping out chaos”, find out why Charity says, “I personally hate [the term ‘SRE’] (but I hate a lot of things)”, and hear Conway’s law applied to microservices, #NoOps debunking, and a poignant ending about misogyny and equality.

Microsoft released its Route 53 competitor in late September. They say:

Azure DNS has the scale and redundancy built-in to ensure high availability for your domains. As a global service, Azure DNS is resilient to multiple Azure region failures and network partitioning for both its control plane and DNS serving plane.

This issue of BWH Safety Matters details an incident in which a communication issue between teams that don’t normally work together resulted in a patient injury. This is exactly the kind of pitfall that becomes more prevalent with the move toward microservices, as siloed teams sometimes come into contact only during an incident.

A detailed postmortem from an outage last month. Lots of takeaways, including one that kept coming up: test your emergency tooling before you need to use it.