Improving Automation Safety

Making automation safe is essential to making it usable at scale. How do we make automation safe? We found a lot of great insights drawing from space craft design, aircraft, aircraft design and other systems where safety is super important.

Automation is a force multiplier. If we don’t factor in safety when we build it,then we could create a lot of harm in systems from wasteful spending to actual injury. These designs have very real implications.

Transcript: otter.ai/u/p9w4aKOqm3rpHhbDtRTaLgN3GIA
Image: www.pexels.com/photo/toddler-usi…-on-road-1642055/

Rob’s Hot Take:

In the Cloud 2030 Podcast on March 15th, Rob Hirschfeld underscores the critical importance of automation safety in system design. Emphasizing the need for thorough testing, he discusses how safety, especially in complex systems like airplanes and spacecraft, requires continuous testing and monitoring. The conversation delves into the significance of not just completing tasks but also exercising and testing systems in various scenarios to ensure their safety. To explore these insights further, listen to the full episode on March 15th at the2030.cloud and participate in the ongoing discussions.

May 5 – Weekly Recap of All Things Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things SRE. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

SRE Items of the Week

RackN Announcement
[PRESS RELEASE] RackN Ends DevOps Gridlock in Data Center  

Today we announced the availability of Digital Rebar Provision, the industry’s first cloud-native physical provisioning utility.  We’ve had this in the Digital Rebar community for a few weeks before offering support and response has been great! READ MORE
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Cloud Native PHYSICAL PROVISIONING? Come on! Really?!
 By Rob Hirschfeld

Today, RackN announce very low entry level support for Digital Rebar Provisioning – the RESTful Cobbler PXE/DHCP replacement.  Having a company actually standing behind this core data center function with support is a big deal; however…

We’re making two BIG claims with Provision: breaking DevOps bottlenecks and cloud native physical provisioning.  We think both points are critical to SRE and Ops success because our current approaches are not keeping pace with developer productivity and hardware complexity. READ MORE

RackN @ DevOpsDays Austin

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Slides from Rob Hirschfeld’s talk – The Server Cage Match

SRE vs DevOps vs Cloud Native: The Server Cage Match by Rob Hirschfeld

I don’t believe in DevOps shaming. Our community seems compelled to correct use of DevOps as an adjective for tools, teams and teapots. The frustration is reasonable: DevOps clearly taps into head space for both devs and operators who see a brighter automated future together. For example, check out this excellent DevOps discourse by Cindy Sridharan.

As an industry, we crave artificial conflict so it’s natural to try and distill site reliability engineering (SRE), DevOps and cloud native into warring factions when they are not. They all share a focus on Lean process. READ MORE

SRE News

What is DevOps? By Cindy Sridharan @copyconstruct  
https://medium.com/@cindysridharan/what-is-devops-5b0181fdb953

It happened again this week.

At this Wednesday’s Prometheus meetup I was hosting, I asked one of the attendees what he did for work.

He looked at me briefly before he barked one word in reply — DevOps — and then promptly made a beeline for the pizza at the back of the room. READ MORE
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An Influx of Kubernetes Installers Raises Questions Around Conformance
https://thenewstack.io/kubernetes-installer-explosion-natural-enthusiasm/

For the Kubecon Europe last month, industry observer Joseph Jacks pulled together a list of over SIXTY (yes, 60) Kubernetes installers and services. This wealth of variation that made itself known as the conference, happily, kicked off a conformance effort to ensure that users get a consistent experience. I’m a strong believer that clear conformance builds ecosystems and have deep experience working on that from my OpenStack DefCore efforts.

In short, conformance is not a vendor issue: it’s a user experience and ecosystem issue.  READ MORE

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com.

OpenStack Summit : May 8 – 11, 2017 in Boston, MA  

  • OpenStack and Kubernetes. Combining the best of both worlds – Kubernetes Day

Interop ITX : May 15 – 19, 2017 in Las Vegas, NV during    Open Source IT Summit – Tuesday, May 16, 9:00 – 5:00pm  

  • 3:15 – 4:05pm OpenStack and Kubernetes
  • 4:05 – 5:00pm Kubernetes for All

Gluecon : May 24 – 25, 2017 in Denver, CO

  • Surviving Day 2 in Open Source Hybrid Automation – May 23, 2017 : Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus

OTHER NEWSLETTERS

SRE Weekly (@SREWeekly) – Issue #70