Imagine this: you're in the middle of an important presentation when all of a sudden your video feed starts to stutter. You hear other people speaking, but their words are choppy. A message comes through Slack from one of your co-workers: "I think your connection cut out." You scramble to try different solutions—restarting your videoconferencing application, checking your Internet connection, switching to your phone—but ultimately, your presentation gets cut short.

For any enterprise, they're more than likely all too familiar with the struggles and complexities of scaling their environments and applications. Whether these applications live on premise, in a cloud environment, or somewhere between in a hybrid state, an age-old question engineering ponders on is, “Can my application and environment scale?

Time for a cross over! Today Page it to the Limit host Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty joins Julie for a special episode. In this two part episode, Julie and Mandi interview Kolton Andrus, co-founder of Gremlin and Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty. Each of them share the origins of their respective companies, how they build amazing cultures, and some of the fun anecdotes along the way.

As the world becomes more dependent on cloud-native systems, the tolerance for slow services is decreasing. Users expect instantaneous access to services, whether it's for work, entertainment, or even cloud infrastructure. Even small amounts of latency can significantly decrease user satisfaction: nearly half of all users expect web pages to load in under two seconds, and as many as 28% of users will permanently abandon a slow site.

In the field of Chaos Theory, there’s a concept called the Synchronization of Chaos—disparate systems filled with randomness will influence the disorder in other systems when coupled together. From a theoretical perspective, these influences can be surprising. It’s difficult to understand exactly how a butterfly flapping its wings could lead to a devastating tornado. But we often see the influences of seemingly unconnected systems play out in real life.

Being new in tech an be intimidating! Thankfully, folks like Carissa Morrow are shining examples of how to come into tech from the ground up. Carissa began with a career shift and just started coding, went through the Boise Codeworks bootcamp, and made the jump to tech. Carissa talks about the resilience it took in her early days, and how those experiences reinforced her attitude on continually learning.

When Ticketmaster started their Kubernetes migration, they had to address a huge problem: whenever ticket sales opened for a popular event, as many as 150 million visitors flooded their website, effectively causing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. With new events happening every 20 minutes and $7.6 billion in revenue at stake, outages could mean hundreds of thousands in lost sales.

It's the middle of the night when your phone goes off. You rub your eyes and unlock the screen to see a SEV 1 alert from your incident management tool. The application is down, multiple cloud server instances are offline, and the remaining instances are being overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand. You jump out of bed and start trying to troubleshoot. You log into your cloud provider and try to provision systems manually, only to find out you can't.

You can subscribe to Break Things on Purpose wherever you get your podcasts. In this episode of the Break Things on Purpose podcast, we speak with Sam Rossoff, Principal Software Engineer at Gremlin.