Chaos Engineering, where engineers intentionally inject failure to test the reliability of their systems, is becoming a regular practice for companies who value uptime and availability. As cloud-based systems have grown more complex, Chaos Engineering has become a critical part of the software testing and release process to uncover surprise dependencies, fix problems before they become 3am outages, and bake reliability into every feature.

In this episode, Jason chats with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. Aaron shares what it was like starting out as a developer at RBC and working in early cloud development, and then transitioning to his role as a developer advocate. Jason and Aaron talk about the value applying open source principles within organizations, or “innersource.” Their time ends with a discussion on continuing education and how to keep learning.

In their report titled “IT Resilience — 7 Tips for Improving Reliability, Tolerability and Disaster Recovery”, Gartner presents seven strategies for improving the resilience posture of your critical systems. These recommendations range from how to get started, to identifying IT hazards and risks to reliability, to capturing metrics and translating them into business value. In this blog, we’ll take a high-level look at the report and summarize some of its key findings.

In this episode, we chat with Cisco’s head of developer content, community, and events, Michael Chenetz. We discuss everything from KubeCon to kindness and Legos! Michael delves into some of the main themes he heard from creators at KubeCon, and we discuss methods for increasing adoption of new concepts in your organization. We have a conversation about attending live conferences, COVID protocol, and COVID shaming, and then we talk about how Legos can be used in talks to demonstrate concepts.

It’s time to shoot for the stars with Dan Isla, VP of Product at itopia, to talk about everything from astronomical importance of reliability to time zones on Mars. Dan’s trajectory has been a propulsion of jobs bordering on the science fiction, with a history at NASA, modernizing cloud computing for them, and loads more. Dan discusses the finite room for risk and failure in space travel with an anecdote from his work on Curiosity.

You might be familiar with GameDays at this point. From watching our Introduction to GameDay webinar, viewing our Demo video, and reading our tutorial, you’ve probably learned that GameDays were created with the goal of increasing reliability by purposely creating major failures on a regular basis. Better yet, perhaps your own team has run a GameDay and learned something new about their services’ behavior during failure scenarios.

Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy.

For this episode we’re continuing to “Build Things on Purpose” with JJ Tang, co-founder of Rootly, who joins us to talk about incident response, the tool he’s built, and his many lessons learned from incidents. Rootly is aiming to automate some of the more tedious work around incidents, and keeping that consistency. JJ chats about why he and his co-founder built Rootly, and the problems they’re trying to fix and eliminate when it comes to reliability.

Today’s enterprises are struggling to cope with the complexities of their environments, technologies, and applications. On top of these challenges, they face faster release rates, and the need to always deliver the highest level of performance and availability to end-users, at the lowest possible cost.