Trade-offs under pressure: heuristics and observations of teams resolving internet service outages (Part 1)
Trade-offs under pressure: heuristics and observations of teams resolving internet service outages, Allspaw, Masters thesis, Lund University, 2015
Following on from the STELLA report, today we’re going back to the first major work to study the human and organisational side of incident management in business-critical Internet services: John Allspaw’s 2015 Masters thesis. The document runs to 87 pages, so I’m going to cover the material across two posts. Today we’ll be looking at the background and literature review sections, which place the activity in a rich context and provide many jumping off points for going deeper in areas of interest to you. In the next post we’ll look at the detailed analysis of how a team at Etsy handled a particular incident on December 4th 2014, to see what we can learn from it.
Why is this even a thing?
Perhaps it seems obvious that incident management is hard. But it’s worth recaping some of the reasons why this is the case, and what makes it an area worthy of study.
The operating environment of Internet services contains many of the ingredients necessary for ambiguity and high consequences for mistakes in the diagnosis and response of an adverse Continue reading
